Tomo Inouye

Tomo Inouye (b. 1870) was a Japanese medical doctor, trained at the University of Michigan Medical School. She was the founder of the Japanese Medical Women's Society.

Tomo Inouye, from a 1901 publication.

Early life

Inouye was born in Fukuoka. Inouye attended a Methodist girls' school in Nagasaki, Japan.

Education

Inouye began to study homeopathic medicine with an American doctor, Mary A. Gault, who was married to a Japanese man and who ran a clinic at Nagasaki.[1] She is said to have chosen medicine because she was too short to qualify for nurses' training.[2]

In 1898, Inouye graduated from the Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College.[1] She was the only woman in a group of eight Japanese students enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1900.[3] She earned her medical degree there in 1901, and received her Japanese medical license in 1903.[4]

Career

Inouye was a delegate to the fourth world conference of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Toronto in 1897.[5] She returned to Japan after medical school,[6] and was a practicing physician in Tokyo. She was also appointed a medical inspector for school girls in Tokyo, and taught hygiene and health classes. She was active with the YWCA of Japan.[7]

In 1920, she revisited her alma mater with Ida Kahn, the school's first Chinese woman graduate.[8] Both women were in the United States to attend the International Conference of Women Physicians in New York City in 1919.[9]

Tomo Inouye founded the Japanese Medical Women's Society, and was a founding member and at-large board member of the Medical Women's International Society (MWIA) in 1919.[10] In 1923, she headed a relief project of women physicians responding to the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake.[11][12]

Personal life

Inouye lived through World War II, though her home and belongings were destroyed: "All my pictures, books, instruments, specimens, and everything were burned to the ground through that terrible bomb," she wrote to Michigan friends in 1948. "Therefore I have nothing remained, no keepsake, and made homeless, no relative to look after me, separated from all my friends."[13]

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References
  1. "Tomo Inouye M. D." Medical Era (May 1898): 79.
  2. "A Pioneer Woman Physician" The Trans-Pacific (September 1921): 89-90.
  3. "Japanese Students at the University of Michigan" Detroit Free Press (September 2, 1900): 14. via Newspapers.com
  4. "News" Michigan Alumnus (May 1903): 398.
  5. Ian Tyrrell, Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (UNC Press 2014): 46. ISBN 9781469620800
  6. "A Native Missionary" Bulletin of the Students' Christian Association (November 15, 1901): 2-3.
  7. "Japanese Doctor is YWCA Official" Greencastle Herald (December 16, 1919): 4.
  8. "Dr. Ida Kahn '96m and Dr. Tomo Inouye '01m Visit the University" Michigan Alumnus (January 1920): 177.
  9. Marguerite Mooers Marshall, "American Women's Styles Unhygienic, Inconsistent, says Dr. Tomo Inouye" Evening World (September 25, 1919): 20. via Newspapers.com
  10. Medical Woman's Journal (October 1922): 234.
  11. Kimberly Jensen, Oregon's Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life of Activism (University of Washington Press 2012): 143, 205. ISBN 9780295804408
  12. "Inouye, '01m, Writes of Tokyo Disaster" Michigan Alumnus (March 20, 1924): 701.
  13. University of Michigan History (2014): 265.
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