Nursing Shifts in Sichuan: Canadian Missions and Wartime China, 1937-1951

Escaping from Japanese-occupied China during World War II, the students and faculty at Peking Union Medical College found refuge at the Canadian mission in Chengdu, Sichuan. In the years that followed, the college and mission worked together to care for an extraordinary influx of wartime refugees. Their unlikely partnership transformed Chinese healthcare, establishing the second university nursing program in the country. Although the new Communist government shuttered the school in 1951, the women they trained endured to reopen degree programs thirty-five years later. In our contemporary era, marked by increasing global exchanges in education, Nursing Shifts in Sichuan highlights both the fragility and resilience of impromptu, multinational collaboration.