While we were on vacation in New Brunswick, my mom took my sister and me to the New Mills cemetery where her ancestors have been buried since they came from Scotland in the 19th century. We looked at the gravestones of our great-grandparents and another monument caught our eye…

I decided to Google Dr. Kate and find out why she was in Korea. I was excited to find a Master’s thesis entitled “MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL AND DOCTOR OF MEDICINE”:
THE CANADIAN PRESBYTERIAN MEDICAL MISSION TO KOREA 1898-1923.” Submitted to the History Department of Queen’s University in 2000, this paper by Laura MacDonald looks at the way gender affected the experiences of missionaries during the shift in Christian mission ideology from exclusive focus on evangelism to a greater emphasis on social services (medicine and education).

Ms. MacDonald looks at the case studies of three doctors who served with the Canadian Presbyterian mission to Korea: Robert Grierson (1868-1965), Kate McMillan (1867-1922) and Florence Murray (1894-1975). I’m grateful for the research MacDonald did and what I could learn about Kate McMillan in this paper.

Kate McMillan was born into a farming family in Jacquet River, New Brunswick in 1867. She went to the Provincial Normal School (teacher’s college) in Fredericton, followed by the Women’s Medical College in Baltimore, Maryland and Cornell Medical College in Ithaca, New York. In 1901 at age 34 she embarked for Korea to join the mission that had opened just a few years earlier. MacDonald acknowledges that Dr. Kate’s station reports were businesslike, but her letters on furlough were informative (along with a memoir written by a colleague). MacDonald also quotes this description of Dr. Kate from a 1926 booklet:

“We had perhaps expected a rather masculine type but the tall slender lady in her excellent New York clothes was far from what we expected. The piercing gaze of her fine blue eyes and the determined set of her mouth and chin were an index, as we soon learned, to a character as steady and forceful as Canada can produce.”

Dr. Kate was the first missionary appointed to Korea by the Canadian Presbyterian Women’s Foreign Missionary Society (founded in 1876). The WFMS was under the Foreign Missions Committee (FMC), but in 1891 was permitted to start selecting and training its own female candidates. Just like her male colleagues, Dr. Kate was expected to perform both medical work and evangelism. As MacDonald quotes, Dr. Kate reported to the FMC:

“What has impressed me most since coming here is the greatness of the work to be done, for although the preaching of the Gospel has been wonderfully blessed in this land, yet the number who have become Christians is very, very small indeed compared to the vast multitudes who are in heathen darkness.”

After her arrival in Korea, Dr. Kate spent a year studying the language in Wonsan. In 1903 she moved to Ham Heung to help open a mission station, but was forced to return to Wonsan due to the Russo-Japanese War. (The Ham Heung station finally opened in 1905 and Dr. Kate moved there permanently in 1908.) Meanwhile she opened a girls’ school in Wonsan and later a dispensary with $400 bequeathed to her by her father. In 1909 Dr. Kate went on furlough, in 1910 the missionaries requested an additional doctor, and in 1912 a 15-bed hospital was opened in Ham Heung.

Dr. Kate had a heavy and varied workload. She travelled in rural Korea, treated male and female patients, cared for the other missionaries (including delivering their babies), taught, evangelized, and helped prepare Korean assistants for medical school. The work was often overwhelming with time, money, supplies, and staff in short supply.

In 1922 typhoid broke out in the girls’ school dormitory. Dr. Kate treated seven girls before she herself succumbed to the disease. She died in February, 1922 and was buried in the foreign cemetery in Ham Heung.

I’m glad that Dr. Kate McMillan also has a monument in the cemetery in New Mills, New Brunswick where she can be remembered among her family members for her life and the sacrifices she made serving God as a physician missionary in Korea.