Anna Kay Scott

Anna Kay Scott (April 20, 1838 – October 18, 1923), born Mildred Anne Hasseltine Judson Kay, was an American medical missionary in India and China.

Early life Mildred Ann Hasseltine Judson Kay was born in Payson, Illinois, the seventh of eleven children born to Robert Garnett and Cynthia Mills Kay. Her parents were from Virginia, and her father was a slaveowner. She graduated from Phipps Union Seminary in Albion, New York, and took courses at Quincy College.

Career alt=A white couple posed for a portrait in an oval frame. The man is seated, and wears a beard and a suit; the woman is standing, and wears a dress with a high collar and a voluminous skirt. Her hair is center parted; she had one hand on the man's shoulder. alt=A group portrait of six women, taken outdoors; five Chinese women stand in a row, wearing light-colored tunics and trousers; one white woman, older, is seated in front of the group, wearing all black, with her grey hair dressed in an updo. Anna Kay Scott with five Chinese nurses, from a 1912 publication. Anna Kay taught school in Columbus, Illinois, as a young woman. She married a missionary in 1861, and the two left for a mission post in Nowgong in Assam the following year, arriving in the midst of a cholera epidemic. They spent a year learning Assamese, and worked among the Mikir (Karbi) people in the hills of Assam. She described the 1869 Cachar earthquake in her memoirs: "For two weeks there were tremors of the earth and I knew not if a more severe earthquake might come at any moment." Her husband experienced heat stroke and died from cholera in the months after the quake. She expanded an infirmary into a hospital there, and evacuated to Kobe during the unrest of the Boxer Rebellion.

Books by Scott include Korno Siga, the Mountain Chief, or Life in Assam (1889, using the pseudonym Mildred Marston), Gleanings from the Journal of a Medical Missionary, and An Autobiography of Anna Kay Scott, M.D. (1917).