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Okami Kei (1859-1941)
Apr. 19th, 2024 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiOkami Kei, also sometimes known as Keiko or Kyoko, was born in 1859 in Aomori Prefecture; her father Nishida Kohei was a merchant and her mother Miyo a samurai’s daughter. They moved to Tokyo after the Meiji Restoration, where Kei attended Yokohama Kyoritsu Girls’ School and underwent Christian baptism. In 1881 she became an English teacher at Sakurai Girls’ School, run by Sakurai Chika and in later forms by Yajima Kajiko.
She met the well-to-do art teacher Okami Senkichiro at church and married him in 1884. Having become involved, through her husband and the missionary Mary True, in ministering to the poor, Kei recognized the need for medical work and decided to travel overseas for a medical degree (unlike Ogino Ginko or Takahashi Mizuko, she had the financial resources to do so).
Following Senkichiro, who was to study at Michigan Agricultural College, she traveled to the United States in the same year as their marriage, attending the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and receiving her MD there four years later. She thus became the first Japanese woman to hold a medical degree granted overseas. Her classmates at the Medical College included Susan LaFlesche, the first Indigenous woman in the US to hold a medical degree, as well as Anandibai Joshi from India and Sabat (or Tabat) Islambouli from Syria, likewise trailblazers in their countries.
Kei and her husband returned to Japan in 1889, where in August she became the fifth woman registered as a doctor. Hired as the head of gynecology at the Tokyo Jikei Hospital in 1890, she left in 1892, apparently in protest because, although she had been scheduled to guide the Meiji Emperor around the hospital upon an official visit, the Emperor had refused to be seen by a woman doctor (another theory is that the Emperor’s refusal was based on nationalist grounds, given that Kei and her husband were Christians educated abroad). She subsequently opened her own clinic out of her home, as well as teaching at Shoei Girls’ School.
In 1893 she worked with her husband and Mrs. True to open a TB treatment facility (for women patients) and a nursing school. With mainly foreign patients, the hospital ran into financial difficulties and closed in 1906. Kei returned to the Joshi Gakuin, the latterday version of Sakurai Girls’ School, to teach English and hygiene. She died of breast cancer in 1941, five years after her husband’s death. Her daughter Mary (named after Mary Morris, Kei’s Quaker benefactor in the US), an aspiring opera singer, predeceased her; she was survived by her sons Bunta and Seiji.
Sources
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B2%A1%E8%A6%8B%E4%BA%AC (Japanese)
https://www.medworld.com/articles/meet-the-female-doctors-behind-the-photograph-that-intrigued-millions-around-the-world (English) Includes photographs of Kei and her foreign classmates
She met the well-to-do art teacher Okami Senkichiro at church and married him in 1884. Having become involved, through her husband and the missionary Mary True, in ministering to the poor, Kei recognized the need for medical work and decided to travel overseas for a medical degree (unlike Ogino Ginko or Takahashi Mizuko, she had the financial resources to do so).
Following Senkichiro, who was to study at Michigan Agricultural College, she traveled to the United States in the same year as their marriage, attending the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and receiving her MD there four years later. She thus became the first Japanese woman to hold a medical degree granted overseas. Her classmates at the Medical College included Susan LaFlesche, the first Indigenous woman in the US to hold a medical degree, as well as Anandibai Joshi from India and Sabat (or Tabat) Islambouli from Syria, likewise trailblazers in their countries.
Kei and her husband returned to Japan in 1889, where in August she became the fifth woman registered as a doctor. Hired as the head of gynecology at the Tokyo Jikei Hospital in 1890, she left in 1892, apparently in protest because, although she had been scheduled to guide the Meiji Emperor around the hospital upon an official visit, the Emperor had refused to be seen by a woman doctor (another theory is that the Emperor’s refusal was based on nationalist grounds, given that Kei and her husband were Christians educated abroad). She subsequently opened her own clinic out of her home, as well as teaching at Shoei Girls’ School.
In 1893 she worked with her husband and Mrs. True to open a TB treatment facility (for women patients) and a nursing school. With mainly foreign patients, the hospital ran into financial difficulties and closed in 1906. Kei returned to the Joshi Gakuin, the latterday version of Sakurai Girls’ School, to teach English and hygiene. She died of breast cancer in 1941, five years after her husband’s death. Her daughter Mary (named after Mary Morris, Kei’s Quaker benefactor in the US), an aspiring opera singer, predeceased her; she was survived by her sons Bunta and Seiji.
Sources
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B2%A1%E8%A6%8B%E4%BA%AC (Japanese)
https://www.medworld.com/articles/meet-the-female-doctors-behind-the-photograph-that-intrigued-millions-around-the-world (English) Includes photographs of Kei and her foreign classmates
