Kilborn, Retta M.D.
Missionary in China ~1864-1942
Mary Alfretta Gifford was born in St. Vincent Township, May 11 1864. Mary attended Riverside Public School and the Owen Sound Collegiate. In 1891, after graduating from the Women’s Medical College of Trinity University in Toronto, she returned to Owen Sound to practise medicine. Travelling to West China on behalf of the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, she was the first western woman to travel to Chengtu, a remote area where white people were rarely seen. In China, she met the recently widowed Dr. Omar Kilborn, and they were wed. A year later, hostilities broke out in China and they were forced to flee. They were sheltered in the home of a Chengtu magistrate; then went to Chunkin until things settled. They returned to Chengtu in 1896, and founded a 90-bed hospital and training school for nurses. In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion forced them to flee China. Their buildings were sealed. All but one remained intact when they returned a year later. Though they were forced to flee twice more, Dr. Retta Kilbourn never lost her devotion to and love for the Chinese people. She helped to organize the Anti-Foot Binding Association and campaigned to allow women to be admitted as medical students to West China Union University, where she herself taught Therapeutics, Anaesthesia, and Diseases of Children. Her husband died in 1920. She continued her missionary work in China, aided by her three children, who were also medical practitioners. She returned to Canada in 1933, after 40 years of missionary work. She died in Toronto at the age of 78 in 1942.
Additional information: Sharon Cake Ed. Eminent Women of Grey County, Grey County Historical Society, Richardson, Bond, Wright Ltd., Owen Sound, 1977.
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