Books: Small Typhoon

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MY DAYS OF STRENGTH— Anne Walter Fearn— Harper ($3).

Popular, petite debutante daughter of a wealthy Mississippi plantation owner, Anne Walter annoyed her mother by studying medicine in San Francisco and Philadelphia. Then she went to China as substitute head of the Women's Hospital in Soochow, a "city of unmentionable sights and indescribable smells." Her energy got her the nickname "Small Typhoon." Buddhist priests spread the rumor that she would gouge out patients' eyes and mix them with copper to make silver. The sick frequently preferred "the death road" by hanging themselves rather than try her medicine.

Not the least of her trials was her pious, domineering husband, Dr. John Burrus Fearn, head of the Men's Hospital at Soochow, later head of the Shanghai General Hospital. When she married him, three years after her arrival in China, she was compelled to read five chapters of the Bible each morning, ten on Sundays, while her hospital routine waited, slowed, stalled. She stood it until one morning the Bible-reading held up a Caesarean, whereupon she slammed the Bible on the floor, crying "I can't bear it! I wish I'd never seen the damned thing!" Although he "never forgave nor forgot," that ended Bible-reading in the Fearn household.