by JAMES S. KIM | @james_s_kim
editor@charactermedia.com
The South Korean government posthumously awarded the Order of Civil Merit to Margaret Jane Edmunds, an American nurse who founded the first nursing school in Korea, the Korea Herald reports.
The Order of Merit, which was announced on Tuesday, comes 70 years after Edmunds’ death in 1945. Her descendants will receive the award at the opening ceremony of the International Council of Nurses 2015 Conference in Seoul on June 19.
Edmunds was born in 1871 in Ontario, Canada. She received her nursing education in Michigan and arrived in Korea in 1903 as a Christian missionary, founding the Pogunyogwan Training School for nurses that same year. The first Korean nurses in history—Kim Martha and Lee Grace—graduated under Edmunds’ tutelage in 1906. The Korean Nurses Association noted the backgrounds of the two Korean women: Kim was an abused housewife, and Lee was a servant for an aristocratic family before they pursued their new careers.
After founding Pogunyogwan, Edmunds served as the school’s president for five years, translating English-language nursing textbooks into Korean and introducing the first uniforms for Korean nurses. After marrying American pastor William Butler Harrison in 1908, Edmunds joined his missionary work in the South Jeolla region. They had a son, Charles, who was born in Mokpo, South Jeolla Province in 1911 (and would later serve in the Korean War). They would return to the U.S. in 1928, where Edmunds died in 1945.
The Pogunyogwan Training School for Nurses is now the division of nursing science at the Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
Edit: A previous version of this article contained a typo that incorrectly stated Edmunds was born in 1971. She was born in 1871. We regret this error.
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Featured image via UCLA’s Online Archive of Christian Missionaries
