Li Bi Cu

Li Bi Cu (born c. 1881) was a Chinese medical doctor who studied in the United States and established hospitals in China.

Personal life Li Bi Cu was born in Putian, China. She had four brothers and one sister. When grown, she married Mr. Li, a Methodist minister. As a young woman, Li Bi Cu was a member of the first Epworth League ever established in China.

Li began studying English in 1897 when she was sixteen years old. and then the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, graduating with high honors in 1905.

I did not intend to come here to speak because, you know, I am a woman. (Great laughter and applause.) But I do want to leave a message with you all this morning. I think you know that the womanhood of China has been very low for several thousand years, and, therefore, now that the new republic is going to be formed, we want to have the womanhood of China lifted as high as the womanhood of your nation. (Tremendous applause.)

Profession and career Li became a medical doctor when she graduated from the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia. After eight years of study, she was the second Chinese woman to graduate in the U.S. as a doctor of medicine.

In summer 1902, she was a nurse in the surgical ward of Rochester Homeopathic Hospital. Ida Kahn, Gertrude Howe, and Li Bi Cu, at a Methodist missionaries meeting in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1919. Before returning to China, Li was received cordially by President Theodore Roosevelt in May 1905 when she called on him to pay her respects. In October she and Miss J. Hughes, her cabinmate, passed through Honolulu, Hawaii, aboard the SS Manchuria on their way to Shanghai.

In Fujian, she began her professional career at Nugeheng, where a hospital was built and furnished by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society under her supervision; in 1907, it was dedicated for the healing of women and children. In that year, she was quoted in a newspaper as saying:

Li was a delegate to the World's Health and Social Morality Conference in New York City in 1919.