The dissertation examines the significant yet neglected career of Yamei Kin, a Chinese woman whose transnational career influenced medicine and women’s rights in the United States and China. Although men dominated medicine, female doctors and nurses played an important role serving the poor and reaching women in China and Japan, where social norms restricted contact between the sexes. Thus, female medical professionals, represented by Yamei Kin, promoted the general welfare of the people, spread medical knowledge, and inspired more women to independence and excellence by their medical work. Yamei Kin is the first Chinese woman who obtained a medical degree in the United States (1885). A trailblazing physician, Kin broke the Chinese and Japanese prejudice against Western medicine and opened the medical profession to women in these two countries. She gave public lectures around America and England on women’s issues such as suffrage and prison reforms. She served as China correspondent of international women’s congress and shuttled among China, U.S. and Europe to improve women’s social status and promote the importance of women’s education. During World War I, she headed the research on soy food of the department of agriculture of the United States to study the potential of protein in soy and overcome a meat shortage during the war, enabling the public to maintain the same nutrition in their bodies even without meat.

Ce sujet concerne avant tout les infirmières, les femmes « les plus louangées » de l’époque, mais aussi les femmes médecins, nouvellement arrivées, à la fin du siècle dernier, dans la profession. Les premières, très nombreuses, sont en quelque sorte évidente, connues par tous mais finalement invisibles, la surreprésentation les effaçant. Les secondes, en petit nombre, sont oubliées ou plus exactement ignorées. Ce sujet semble proche, presque familier, mais il est plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît, se situant à la croisée de plusieurs champs de recherche. L’histoire militaire d’abord, la femme évolue dans un monde d’hommes et dans un univers militarisé. L’histoire de la naissance des professions médicales au féminin, avec une réflexion sur les techniques médicales et sur l’approche de la douleur. L’histoire du genre, on assiste à la construction d’un sexe social, qui met en avant des rapports de domination masculine. Une histoire des représentations, ces femmes, vues à travers différents prismes, sont imaginées, construites par une société d’hommes. Enfin une histoire de l’intime à travers la parole des femmes. C’est celle d’une dominée, exclue des savoirs, du pouvoir, de la sphère guerrière, confinée dans un cadre surveillé, hier le foyer, ici l’hôpital, épinglée par des obligations de conduites, d’apprentissages, de hiérarchie. Le travail se décline à travers un triptyque : les femmes telles qu’on les veut, c’est le point de vue de l’institution masculine, puis les femmes telles qu’on les voit, à travers le prisme des représentations, enfin, ce sont les femmes telles qu’elles se disent, à travers leurs témoignages. / This subject mainly concerns female nurses, « the most praised » women at that time, but also female doctors who had newly arrived in that profession at the end of the last century. The former, very numerous, are « evident » in a way, well known by everybody, but finally « invisible » owing to an over-representation that outshines them. The latter, in small numbers, are forgotten or more precisely ignored. This subject seems close to us, almost familiar, but it is more complex than we think it is, being at the crossroads of several fields of research. First, it has to do with the military history, as women evolve in a man's world, a militarized universe. Then, it is also the history of women entering medical professions for the first time, with a reflexion on medical techniques and the treatment of pain. It is the history of gender, as we witness the building of a social gender gap which highlights man's domination in his relationship with women. The history of the representation of women through different prisms, imagined and built by a male society. Lastly, it is the history of privacy through women's words too. It is the history of women who were dominated, excluded from knowledge, power, the war sphere, women confined to a watched environment - yesterday the home, here the hospital. Women tied by behavioral duties, training and hierarchical obligations. The work comes in a triptych : women such as we want them – and this is men's view - then women as we see them, through the prism of representations and lastly, women as they tell themselves through their testimonies.