Gell Documents

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Scope and Content

Documents relating to the career and life in China during the period 1930-1945 of Mary Prowse Gell, hospital doctor and lecturer in medicine. The collection consists of a small number of documents relating to Dr Gell's career in China, during which she experienced the Japanese invasion of that country and was subsequently interned there by the Japanese during World War II. The documents consist largely of contemporary letters and her own eyewitness accounts

Administrative / Biographical History

Mary Prowse Gell (1894-1978) was born 16th April 1894 and educated at Douglas, Isle of Man. She went on to study medicine at the University of Sheffield where she graduated MBChB in 1922. The Medical Directory shows that, after living in Chesterfield for a time, she had by 1927 moved to China as Medical Officer at St Agatha's Hospital, Ping-Yin, Shantung, North China, from where she subsequently moved to University Hospital, Tsinan in the same province, becoming Associate Professor in the University's Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Letters from Gell indicate a missionary motivation for her move abroad.

Gell continued to live in Tsinan after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1932 which led to the Sino-Japanese war, and was subsequently interned there as a civilian following the outbreak of war between Japan and Great Britain in December 1941.

Following the defeat of Japan in 1945, Dr Gell returned to Britain where she settled in London, becoming Secretary to the Medical Missions Department of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In the mid-1960s she returned to live in the Isle of Man, and in 1978 she died aged 84