Marumo Mune (1869-1944)

[nnozomi]

Marumo Mune was born in 1869 in Gifu as Fukagaya Mune, the daughter of an innkeeper who took her out of school early and set her to working in the local post office, where she consoled herself by reading all the novels she could get her hands on. At seventeen she moved to Tokyo, without her family’s permission, and enrolled in the Saisei Gakusha medical school, where she became close to Yoshioka Yayoi among the other women students. Her lack of early schooling made her medical studies extremely difficult, but she hung on to graduate in 1890, pass the medical practice exam as well, and become Japan’s seventh official female doctor.

After her graduation Mune married Marumo Bunryo, one of the Saisei lecturers, and they jointly opened the large and prosperous Marumo Hospital. She was his assistant in 1896 when he conducted Japan’s first X-ray clinical trials, as well as using X-rays for her own studies in physiology.

Upon the birth of her daughter Fumi (who was also to marry a doctor), she retired from front-line medicine and worked to support her husband and the medical students of the time; this was not an easy decision on her part, requiring consultation with a priest among other means of convincing herself, although she also referred much later to the early traditional education in the ryosai kenbo “good wife, wise mother” ideology that had made her feel women ought not to put themselves too far forward. Her husband died in 1906, aged 45, and for three years Mune did take over as director of their hospital, the first woman in Japan to do so. She also provided medical advice to the writer Higuchi Ichiyo for personal and literary purposes.

Mune spent her later years with her daughter’s family. Fumi’s husband died shortly after the disruption of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, leaving three generations of women to make their own way (Mune, Fumi, and Fumi’s daughter Nobuko, who became a mathematician before dying in her twenties). Mune died in 1944.

Comments

[zenigotchas]

This is so fucking badass. I love doctors (anyone doing medical stuff in general is awesome)

[nnozomi]

I think the early women doctors had to be especially badass to make it through!

[sakana17]

Blows my mind to imagine being 17 and moving alone to Tokyo to go to medical school! And graduating at 21. In the 19th century. As a woman. Incredible.

[nnozomi]

being 17 and moving alone to Tokyo to go to medical school! And graduating at 21. In the 19th century. As a woman.
I know! So many of these women just had mind-boggling guts and endurance.