ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the education of Catholic Sister-physicians, surgeons and obstetricians who trained for medical mission field in mid-twentieth-century. Catholic Sisters, educated to be scientific practitioners in the mid-twentieth-century, were convinced that they could bring established biomedical knowledge and therapeutics to the missions in order to provide health-care access as one answer to an uneven distribution of health-care. The chapter explores the educational experiences of Sisters, or nuns, and respective curricula and destinations after education. It then discusses experiences of Medical Mission Sisters (MMS), established by Anna Dengel in 1925 in Washington, DC. The chapter focuses on scholarship of women from faith-based backgrounds in medicine. The experiences Sisters gained in medical schools prepared them to practise in an expanding international medical mission field after the Second World War. The Catholic Church provided a structure for women in religious congregations, celibate women to obtain medical education and eventually to cross national borders as they developed care networks all over the world.
