Letter from Anna Degenring to Martha Tracy

Anna Degenring graduated from Woman’s Medical College in 1904. Anna entered Woman’s Medical College for the sole purpose of becoming a medical missionary, and her education was funded by the Woman’s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of New Jersey. She had previously trained as a nurse. In 1906, she was sent as medical missionary to Vellore, India, by the American Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. In Vellore, she worked at the American Baptist Mission Hospital for Women and Children. The hospital began a small dispensary in 1900, set up by Dr. Ida Scudder, and by 1902, it had grown to 40-bed hospital. Degenring was also a professor at the Vellore Medical College, where she taught Indian students prevention and care of children’s diseases. She took a leave to come home and when she returned to Vellore in 1923, she became superintendent of the hospital and remained there until 1936, when she retired.

Degenring began her work at American Baptist Mission Hospital for Women and Children. In 1909, its founder, Dr. Ida Scudder, began a training program for nurses, and in 1918, she began training women doctors at the Union Mission Medical School for Women in Vellore. Degenring was a professor, and her letter to Martha Tracy emphasizes the need for not only funding for medical missions in India, but also a great need for women physicians.