Dorothy Xu (Xu Delan) was born on November 30, 1902. She was the sixth daughter of Xu Qin (Huie Kin), pastor of the First Chinese Presbyterian Church in New York City, and Louise Van Arnam. Dorothy graduated with an MA from Columbia University and married Wang Yihui. Wang, born in 1899, received his medical degree from St John’s in Shanghai, training as an intern at Johns Hopkins University hospital in Baltimore and a hospital in New York City. They were married in Beijing on December 1, 1928 and had four children together.
They both taught at the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC). Her research focused on the eradication of kala-azar, a disease which, if left untreated, led to death, and which was endemic to rural China north of the Yangtze River.
After the Japanese army occupied North China in the early 1930s, the Wangs moved to Shanghai and became affiliated with St. John’s University medical school. Dorothy taught microbiology at St. John’s from 1943-44.
After the couple was legally separated, Wang continued to work in hospitals in Shanghai and then in Xian, where he died. Dorothy later moved to the United States where she worked at Yale University as a medical librarian while teaching microbiology. Dorothy Xu Wang died in on October 24, 1999 in Colorado Springs, Colorado at the age of ninety-six. An announcement said, “Her death marks the end of a major era in the history of the Huie family.”
Sources
Stacey Bieler, “The Xu Family: A Legacy of Service,” in Salt and Light: More Lives of Faith That Shaped Modern China, edited by Carol Lee Hamrin with Stacey Bieler, 103-4.