Lin Qiaozhi: no children of her own — and 50,000 babies delivered

The archive of Peking Union Medical College Hospital holds one particular appointment letter. In 1929, Lin Qiaozhi became the hospital's first Chinese woman resident physician.

The letter contained a clause that was standard at the time: if, during the period of appointment, she married, gave birth, or became pregnant, the appointment would be terminated automatically. Lin Qiaozhi was twenty-eight. She signed it.

She kept that condition for the rest of her life. She never married and had no children, and she became the most important name in the history of Chinese obstetrics, delivering more than fifty thousand babies. People called her the Mother of Ten Thousand Babies.

Her clinic had a reputation for one thing above all: she did not look at who you were. She was a department head at Union, and she treated the wives of senior officials and the wives of pedicab drivers. When a poor family could not get an appointment, she took them home after clinic and saw them there. Her case notes were written neatly and in detail, and her beautiful English hand was copied by younger doctors as a model. An old colleague remembered that on rounds Dr. Lin always took the patient's hand first. A woman on a delivery bed, she said, does not most need technique. She needs someone beside her.

"I am on duty at all times and everywhere," she said. And so the telephone beside her bed, there for decades, the thing she called her only companion, became the footnote to her whole life. When it rang, whatever the hour, she got up and went. Fifty thousand first cries were let into the world, one after another, in the deep nights that began with that phone.

She had no children, and fifty thousand families wrote her name into the record of their children's growing up.

Her care for the women was detailed enough to be hard to listen to. When a woman screamed with pain she did not scold her; she leaned close and said quietly, hold my hand. When a delivery turned difficult she stood in the room for a dozen hours. When a family could not pay, she often covered the bill herself. In one case a baby was born not breathing, and everyone assumed it was lost. She held the infant against her chest and warmed it with her own body heat through a winter night. Nobody counted the hours. The child lived, and the family named him Nian Lin — remembering Lin.

In her last years, ill and confined to bed, she finished a five-hundred-thousand-character monograph, Gynecologic Oncology, in that bed. She died in 1983 at eighty-two. In her will she left her life savings to the hospital's nursery, and her ashes were scattered in the sea around Gulangyu, the island where she was born. She came from the seaside and went back to it, like the delivery room she guarded for more than forty years: arriving to the sound of wind, leaving to the sound of waves.

At Peking Union today, when new obstetrics doctors come in, the senior staff tell them the story of Dr. Lin. It always ends the same way: what you are holding in your hands is somebody's entire world. She said that all her life, and she did it all her life.

She left a second kind of legacy as well: her case notes. In the hospital's old files her records are held up as models — the course of the illness set out plainly, the handwriting as upright as print. A young doctor once asked what the point was of writing them so well. "Case notes are written for the next person who takes over," she said. "Every sentence you make clear spares the patient a little trouble. In medicine, every corner of the work is about thinking of other people."