1. Early life

2. Career

3. Personal life

4. References

5. External links

Kin Yamei (金韻梅, 1864 – March 4, 1934) also seen as Chin Ya-mei or Jin Yunmei, or anglicized as Y. May King, was a Chinese-born, American-raised doctor, hospital administrator, educator, and nutrition expert. She is credited with introducing tofu to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) during World War I.

Early life

Kin Yamei was born in 1864, in Ningbo. Her father, Rev. Kying Ling-yiu (Chin Ding-yu), was a Christian convert. As a small child she was orphaned during an epidemic; she was adopted by American missionaries, Divie Bethune McCartee and Juana M. Knight McCartee. They encouraged her to use her given name, and to learn Chinese as well as English; she also learned to speak Japanese and French. She attended the Women's Medical College of New York, where she finished at the top of her class,^[1] and the Chinese Consul attended the graduation ceremony to witness her achievement.^[2] She pursued further study in Philadelphia and Washington, D. C. In 1888 she became the first Chinese woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.^[3] She also learned photography skills, and published a journal article on medical photo-micrography while she was in medical school.^[4]

Career

From 1890 to 1894, she ran a hospital for women and children in Kobe, Japan, where she stayed while recovering from malaria. She was superintendent at a women's hospital and nurses' training program at Tientsin.^[5] She also founded the Northern Medical School for Women at Zhili, in 1907.

She also lectured in the United States about Chinese culture, women, and medicine,^[6] including a speech to the Los Angeles Medical Association,^[7] and a speech at Carnegie Hall.^[8] She published an article about Honolulu's Chinatown in Overland Monthly (1902), and an article about soybeans in the New-York Tribune (1904). She spent World War I in the United States, working with the USDA on nutritional and other uses for soybeans, and introducing tofu to American food scientists.^[9] She addressed an international Peace Conference in 1904, in New York City.^[10]

Personal life

Kin Yamei married Hippolytus Laesola Amador Eca da Silva, in 1894 in Japan. Mr. da Silva was a merchant and interpreter born in Hong Kong.^[11] They divorced in 1904.^[12] They had a son, Alexander, born in 1895 in Honolulu, Hawaii; he died in 1918 as an American soldier in World War I, in France, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, under the name "Alexander A. Kin". Kin Yamei spent her later years in Beijing, and died from pneumonia in 1934, aged 70 years.^[4]

References

External links

• [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/obituaries/yamei-kin-overlooked.html Overlooked No More: Yamei Kin, the Chinese Doctor Who Introduced Tofu to the West] – The New York Times
• Biographical information about Kin Yamei at the Soy Info Center.

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