On the second floor of Sterling Hall of Medicine, portraits of women faculty from the Yale School of Medicine line the walls. For Qi Yan and Sunny Wang, two international students from China, the images also raised a deeper question: how many stories of Asian women in medicine remain obscured from this record? As Qi explains, “It is really an honor to write a review about the history of Asian women at Yale School of Medicine (YSM)—a piece that can bring attention to those stories and one that resonates with my own journey.”
Figure 1.
Photograph depicting the portraits of women faculty displayed on the second floor of Yale’s Sterling Hall of Medicine.
Qi Yan is a 5th-year PhD student in physiology who came to Yale in 2018 for a summer program—her first time abroad. Xuezhu (Sunny) Wang, a recent MD graduate from Peking Union Medical College in Beijing, arrived at Yale in 2024 for a clinical rotation at the Yale New Haven Hospital. Former classmates in China, the two reconnected at Yale with a shared commitment to research the stories of Asian women at YSM. “I had an immersive experience at the Yale Cancer Center, working alongside incredible students, residents, fellows, and faculty,” Sunny recalls. “Those connections are what continue to tie me to Yale today.”
Their project began when Qi noticed that YJBM was preparing a “History of Medicine” issue and saw an opportunity to contribute. “When Sunny came to Yale, I asked her if she would be willing to join the story,” Qi says. “She also thought it was a great idea, which is why we started this project.” With encouragement from Dr. Melissa Grafe, the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History and Head of the Medical Historical Library, they began their work, piecing together the beginnings of a history that had long been overlooked.
Qi and Sunny’s historical project focuses on the narratives of Asian women medical practitioners that have gone underdocumented within the School of Medicine’s history. While their research illuminates manifold stories of women physicians and scientists, there is one figure that takes center stage: Dr. Chenghui Ge.
Following Ge’s graduation from Shanghai Women’s Medical College in 1915, she traveled overseas to continue her education at Yale. Dr. Ge obtained a Master of Public Health (MPH) and Doctorate of Public Health (DrPH), in 1924 and 1926, respectively, from the YSM’s Public Health Department, now known as the Yale School of Public Health. This marked her as the first Chinese woman to be awarded both those degrees from YSM. However, it is how Dr. Ge matriculated to Yale that presents a story of much intrigue. As Qi and Sunny reviewed archival materials both in English and Chinese, they encountered what seemed to be a clerical error in how Dr. Ge’s gender was documented, with some sources indicating her as a man while others referred to her as a woman. When grappling with these discrepancies, Qi and Sunny surmised that Dr. Ge concealed her gender in both China and the United States as a means to survive and navigate a space that was not designed for women.
Sponsored by the Chinese government, Dr. Ge received the Jiangsu Province Government Scholarship in 1920. Interestingly, she left the gender field on her scholarship application blank. Could this have been a human error and oversight? Qi and Sunny postulate that “...this was kind of Dr. Ge’s…survival strategy…to let herself enter the medical system that had been dominated mainly by male figures during that time. To do that, she rendered her female identity invisible in the records on both the Chinese government’s side and Yale’s.” Following her graduation from Yale, Dr. Ge eventually returned to China to serve as president of the Zhejiang Provincial Maternity School in 1936 and founded Jiading’s Puji Hospital (now Jiading District Central Hospital) in 1947. Through Qi and Sunny’s advocacy, in early 2025, Yale amended Dr. Ge’s pronouns from he/him to she/her on their School of Public Health website, officially recognizing her as the first Chinese woman to graduate from the Yale School of Public Health.
Qi and Sunny’s historical project encapsulates more than just women medical professionals of the early 20th century. To generate further awareness and conversations surrounding gender inequities within the healthcare sphere, they also include narratives from current women physicians at the School of Medicine. As Asian women working in the US medical sphere, Qi and Sunny felt empowered to connect their historical research with the present-day stories of Asian women physicians at YSM, highlighting how much more work still lies ahead in the fight against ongoing gender and racial inequities.
Dr. Sirikanya Chiraroekmongkon, a psychiatrist at Yale, shared her experiences with Qi and Sunny, describing her daily struggles as an Asian physician. Qi recalls Dr. Chiraroekmongkon’s story, expressing that “other physicians think she is a ‘porcelain doll’ because she is Asian. She is not viewed in a professional way… Or they don’t see her at all, because they assume she’s invisible. But no, she is a physician!” Dr. Chiraroekmongkon’s experiences point to the normalization of gender and racial inequities in medicine, a space where, evidently, women are still unfairly treated and provided less respect than their male counterparts.
During Sunny’s clinical rotation at the Yale New Haven Hospital Smilow Cancer Center, she worked closely with head and neck cancer specialist, Dr. Aarti Bhatia. Sunny sat down with Dr. Bhatia to learn more about her experiences navigating the medical system as an Asian physician. According to Dr. Bhatia, it has certainly not been easy. Sunny shares that, “even now as an associate professor at Yale… she, ‘as a small, brown lady’—per herself—still sometimes experiences judgments based on her appearance from the people she speaks with. Some patients asked the doctor how long she had been training, saying she looked very young. Some patients also asked her where she went to medical school.” Dr. Bhatia’s experiences resonate deeply with Dr. Chiraroekmongkon’s, both successful women physicians who continue to encounter gender stigma and prejudice from patients and male colleagues.
As part of their efforts, Qi and Sunny constructed a timeline that traces the many accomplishments of 20th- and 21st-century Asian women physicians at YSM. While the timeline provides only brief bullets and contains some temporal gaps (due to limitations in accessing certain archives), it successfully streamlines Qi and Sunny’s research for viewers.
Figure 2.
Asian Women at the Yale School of Medicine Timeline, adapted from Qi Yan and Xuezhu (Sunny) Yang, September 2025.
For Qi and Sunny, working on this project served as a reminder that care is not confined to the clinic nor the lab—it can also take the form of recovering and preserving history. "Medicine is about providing comfort to patients,” Sunny reflects, “...but I have to remember that patients are living in a society, and doctors are living in the same society as well.” For Sunny, documenting the experiences of Asian women physicians underscores the importance of confronting the prejudices and social dynamics that mold the physician-patient relationship. Qi agrees, powerfully emphasizing that their historical research itself is an act of care: “Preserving the history is a kind of care. Challenging the current biases against ourselves is also a care. We are going to co-create better spaces for future generations of doctors and scientists—yes, that’s care.”
Qi and Sunny’s experiences are also a testament to the value found within the history of medicine. Qi shares how “as scientists and physicians, we are trained for reproducible data and definite answers like “yes” or “no,” or “hypothesis correct” or “not correct.” “Working on this project makes us feel like historical research is totally different…We had to accept that for one event there is no single truth.” Medicine is not stagnant, but constantly evolving in tandem with the shifts in societal values, cultures, and technological advancements. As Qi and Sunny both noted, the history of medicine provides us with a tool to grapple with these changes, which aims to trace medicine’s past in order to understand its present.
In its constant transformations, the history of medicine as a discipline embodies a sense of interdisciplinarity. Qi and Sunny have underscored how history can offer tools to supplement their work in the biomedical sciences. Sunny beautifully illustrates this point by attesting that, “...When doing this project, we had to think about the individuals who are living behind the story, who are living behind the digits and numbers. Those are real people…” History of medicine may act as an intervention within the biomedical sciences, enabling its interlocutors to reevaluate the norms that may obfuscate human identities, stories, and biases. By engaging with history, they seek to usher the human back to the fore of medicine.
This notion of interdisciplinarity is tied to a common misconception among biomedical scientists and researchers that medical knowledge-making processes are mutually exclusive from their humanistic counterparts. Modern science prides itself on its “objectivity”—a philosophical ideal grounded in empiricism and quantification. As a medical student, Sunny expresses that, “‘we say that ‘data speaks.’ – we collect big data and do statistics. However, in this project, Qi and I found that historical research is not the same as scientific research.” The normalization of the biomedical sciences as the primary pillar of medical knowledge production must be dismantled. Qi and Sunny, both new to the history of medicine, elegantly articulate that, “historical research… is to alleviate the harm that has been done to those who are silenced, not represented, and/or misrepresented.” By looking towards the humanities, biomedical researchers and scientists may discover novel ways to approach their own work and discover new meanings. How does this exchange of perspectives impact the questions biomedical scientists and researchers ask or the kinds of answers they accept?
While Qi and Sunny’s project has opened a vital space for recognizing the contributions of Asian women at YSM, it also highlights the limitations of what archival research alone can reveal. Many stories remain partial, fragmented, or absent altogether due to the historical silences in institutional records. Without deeper investment from Yale and other universities in sustaining oral histories, community archiving, and multilingual collections, the histories of women of color in medicine will continue to go underdocumented. Greater institutional support is needed not only to preserve what already exists, but also to make room for new narratives.
Another limitation stems from the broader context of racialization, colorism, and diaspora, issues that were not directly addressed in this project, but which are central to any future work. The category of “Asian,” “women,” and “Asian women” are not monolithic; they encompass wide-ranging national, ethnic, linguistic, and class experiences, many of which intersect with racism and colorism both in the US and within Asian diasporic communities themselves. A critical history of the professionalization of Asian women in medicine must contend with these internal hierarchies and exclusions, recognizing how migration, colonialism, and global inequality have shaped opportunities differently across groups.
Finally, Qi and Sunny’s project emphasizes the importance of reflexivity in writing histories of medicine. Who gets to tell these stories, and from what vantage point? As Qi and Sunny themselves acknowledge, their work is only a beginning—an invitation to others to continue, to complicate, and to correct. Their timeline and archival work lay a crucial foundation, but much more remains to be done to fully capture the lived experiences of Asian women in medicine and more broadly, of women of color in medicine. For Yale and other institutions, the challenge will be to recognize history not as a static record but as an ongoing practice of care—one that demands resources, accountability, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.
The full transcript of the interview is available as supplementary material below.
Supplementary Material
Transcript of interview with Qi Yan and Xuezhu (Sunny) Wang
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express their gratitude and appreciation to Qi Yan and Sunny Wang for their partnership, care, and dedication to this project on the history of Asian women at the Yale School of Medicine. Qi Yan and Sunny Wang would like to thank Dr. Melissa Grafe for her guidance and mentorship on this passion project, helping them narrow down their topic and providing them with both resources and collections to view. Qi would also like to thank Dr. Sirikanya Chiraroekmongkon and Dr. Eunice Yuen for their permission to share their personal stories and experiences. Sunny would like to express gratitude to Dr. Mark D. Siegel and Dr. Shaili Gupta of the Yale Traditional Internal Medicine Residency Program for their advice, and to Dr. Maryam Lustberg and Dr. Aarti Bhatia for their generosity in allowing them to share their journeys as women physicians of color.
Glossary
- YSM
Yale School of Medicine
For more information on Qi and Sunny’s work, please view their preprint below: Yan Q. and Wang X. Asian Women Who Made History at Yale School of Medicine: Overcoming Barriers, Leading Initiatives, and Raising Their Voices [preprint]. May 15, 2025. Available from: https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202505.1246.v1
Associated Data
This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.
Supplementary Materials
Transcript of interview with Qi Yan and Xuezhu (Sunny) Wang