It was not the tests that were the most daunting to the young women, but dealing with bodies and blood. Most of the students had a horror of touching blood, and many times Ida had to stop her lesson for a few minutes while someone revived a student who had fainted. The local jail provided Ida with two dead bodies for the class to dissect, which proved to be a tremendous challenge for everyone. Ebbie, one of Ida’s favorite students, was deathly afraid of the sight of blood and begged to be allowed to go home. She even wrote to her sister asking her to come and take her away. But Ida would not hear of it. “No,” she said, “you have too much potential; you must stay and toughen up.”
Ida realized that these young women were attempting something that had never before been done in Indian culture, and she helped them as best she could. But she also understood that, in the end, to get respect, they had to be as good as or better than their male counterparts. And so the women worked hard. Ida gave her students the opportunity to play hard too. She set up badminton and tennis courts for them to play on in the evenings, and sometimes all seventeen of them piled into the Model T Ford with Ida for a jaunt into the countryside.
The students worked in the hospital and at the Roadsides seven days a week. They had time off for church on Sunday but were expected to do their various duties after that. “Sunday is God’s day,” Ida would tell them, “and this is God’s work, so we need to do it especially well on Sunday.”
Ida worked harder than they all did, and many Indian people marveled at the dedication she showed to her adopted land. In September she received official notification that she was to be awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind award given by King George V for public service to India. This was quite an honor, especially as Ida was to be given the gold medal first-class. The ceremony in Government House in Madras was a glittering affair, attended by eight hundred of the most prominent people in South India. The silk dresses and diamond tiaras would have once awed Ida, but now she was more interested in seeking out people who could help promote rural health care and her medical school for women.
By Christmas three of the students had dropped out, one through illness, one to get married, and one because she found the work too difficult. The fourteen who remained told Ida they were determined to stay and graduate.
Three months after the school started, there was more than enough work for everyone. The war in Europe had come to an end in November, but another killer followed on its heels. A great influenza epidemic swept around the world. Vellore was not spared. The local people had never seen a disease like it, and many of them turned to their gods. In village after village, they hung out old rags and broken baskets, hoping that the goddess of death would see these items and deem their village unworthy of her presence.
At the hospital both patients and staff were hit hard. The head nurse of the hospital died, as did six of the other nurses. They were people Ida could not afford to lose, but somehow the survivors carried on.
Eventually the epidemic subsided, and May 1919 rolled around. It was time for Ida to accompany her students to Madras for their first-year medical examinations. As they all bundled on the train together, Ida was sure she was more nervous than her students were. She tried to distract herself by looking out the window, but doubts kept filling her mind. What if Colonel Bryson was right? She knew the girls had tried their hardest, but was it enough to compete against the brightest young men in India, all of whom were trained at well-equipped medical colleges? Ida did not know. And meeting Colonel Bryson in the hallway soon after she arrived didn’t help ease her mind.
“My dear doctor,” the colonel told Ida, “please don’t be discouraged if none of your students makes the grade the first time.”
“None of them?” Ida repeated in horror.
The colonel’s voice softened. “It wouldn’t be surprising. It’s a very difficult exam. Only about 20 percent of the men pass, and naturally we can’t expect too much of your young women.” He smiled. “But they can always try again.”
Try again! Ida thought. These fourteen women had worked as hard as humanly possible. If some of them did not pass, Ida had no idea what they could do differently next time around.
Chapter 12
The Top Medical School in the District
When the examinations were over, Ida and her students returned to Vellore to await the results. Ida prayed that some of the girls would pass. It would be discouraging if not a single student made it to the second year.
Three weeks later Ida received a letter from Colonel Bryson. Her hands shook as she opened it. She gasped as she read down the list of names. Ebbie, pass. Thai, pass. Saramma, pass. Anna, pass. Her eyes scanned to the bottom of the sheet. Every one of the girls had passed! The men’s colleges had a 20 percent pass rate, but the Vellore medical college had a 100 percent pass rate. Ida ran to find the girls so they could all celebrate together.
“You did it. You all did it,” she told them excitedly. “And can you believe it? We came in top of all the medical schools in the district!”
Ida found it hard to believe this herself. The next time she saw Colonel Bryson, he sheepishly shook her hand.
“I’m afraid, Dr. Scudder,” he said awkwardly, “that your girls are setting too high a standard for our men to live up to.”
Ida smiled and said nothing.
Word traveled fast, and that year there were twice as many students applying to the best medical college in the Madras region. Ida accepted twenty-five of them, bringing the total number of students enrolled to thirty-nine. Since government regulations required three hospital beds for each student, Ida had to increase the number of hospital beds to 117. This was no easy feat, and the verandas had to be pressed into service as wards. The need to expand the hospital still further was more urgent than ever.
The number of orphans Ida had taken in and now cared for had grown too. They now numbered twenty-three, ranging in age from six months to sixteen years.
As the needs of the mission grew, Ida eagerly received letters from Lucy Peabody in the United States. Lucy was raising money for Vellore and other missions that helped women throughout Asia. As the money that Lucy had raised came in, Ida was able to begin a building program at Thotapalayam, two miles away from Schell Hospital. There Ida watched impatiently as a chapel, a children’s ward, and a maternity hospital began to take shape.
Money trickled in for the project until February 1921, when Ida received some wonderful news. Lucy wrote to tell her that the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund had offered one million dollars to be shared among the seven planned and existing Asian universities for women that Lucy raised money for. There was just one catch. Lucy and her committee had to come up with matching funds of two million dollars before the end of 1922! It wasn’t difficult to do the math. Two million plus one million was three million dollars divided among seven institutions, which meant that each institution would receive $425,000. Ida knew just what she could do with that amount of money, and she arranged to go back to the United States to help raise it.
Before that, however, the first class of medical students graduated in March 1922. It was a day Ida would never forget. The nursing students braided thick chains of jasmine and ferns and formed an aisle for the fourteen students to walk along. Colonel Bryson was there to hand out the diplomas and offer congratulations to the women and to compliment Ida.
“She is a woman not only of vision but also of persistence,” he told the group. “‘Medical school, medical school, medical school…’ She kept saying it. And she has not been oversilent, overmodest in her demands!”
Everyone laughed, including Ida. She knew she’d had to push Colonel Bryson to allow her to start the medical school, but as she looked from woman to woman, she knew it had all been worthwhile.
In front of her stood Ebbie Gnanamuthu, the girl who had been terrified of the sight of blood and begged to be allowed to leave the school. Now Ebbie had won the Government of India’s gold medal in anatomy, and most of her fellow students had also won top awards. And better yet for Ida, fifty-two more students were watching the ceremony, dreaming of their own graduation.
Ida was due to leave for furlough in the United States in less than two months, and the graduation ceremony was a wonderful note to leave Vellore on.
Ida, her mother, who was now eighty years old, and Gertrude set sail together on May 5, 1922. This time they left from Bombay, and as the ship chugged its way to Boston, it made only one stop along the way, in Aden. Ida did not care. The sooner she met with Lucy and helped with the fundraising efforts, the happier she would be. By the time the ship steamed into Boston Harbor, Ida had just six months left to raise the money before the end-of-year deadline.
This time Ida did not feel that she could spend time on the farm in Nebraska with her extended family. Instead, two of her brothers met the women when the ship docked and took Mrs. Scudder away for a vacation. Ida and Gertrude went straight to work. They met with Lucy, who was doing all she could to raise the money. Lucy had marshaled a group of women from ten denominations in the United States and Canada, and the women called themselves the Committee for the Women’s Union Christian Colleges of the Orient. From what Ida could gather, the women had worked tirelessly, but they were still well short of the two million dollars needed.
Ida added her weight to the campaign, traveling from New York to Michigan to Ohio and Minnesota. Everywhere she went, her message was the same. There were more than 165 million women and girls in India and only 159 female doctors to care for them. The Western world could never send over enough qualified women doctors to serve all of these people, and Indian women were ready and able to take up the challenge; they just needed support from the West to get going. The message hit home, but in her quiet moments, even Ida had to admit that two million dollars was an unprecedented amount to raise.
Thankfully, Ida did not have many quiet moments. She was too busy organizing events such as College Days, where she urged colleges in the United States to adopt sister colleges from the seven they were raising money for.
The weeks passed swiftly as Ida and the others raced against the clock to come up with the money. On December 9, 1922, Ida’s fifty-second birthday, they held Dollar Day, where they urged thousands of people to give a dollar each to the cause. This was a successful event but not successful enough, and on December 31, 1922, Lucy came to Ida in tears.
“It’s no use. Our time has run out, and we have done all we can, but we are fifty thousand dollars short,” she sobbed.
Even when news came that the Rockefeller Foundation had extended the deadline by a month, Lucy held out little hope that the money would be raised. Still, she went on a scheduled fundraising trip to California, where she met an elderly women who wrote a check for the last fifty thousand dollars—on January 31, 1923, the last day of the extension.
When Ida and Gertrude Dodd heard the news, they could barely contain their excitement. The next day the New York Times blazed the headline: “$3,000,000 ASSURED TO SCHOOLS IN EAST. Church Women Win $2,000,000 Campaign and Rockefellers Give the Rest.” It was the headline so many women had prayed and worked toward. Now that the money was assured, Ida was eager to get back to India and turn the new funds into buildings.
In her usual style, Ida had kept her eye out for potential staff as she traveled around, and she was delighted to meet a young doctor named Carol Jameson, who had graduated from Stanford University. Carol was currently doing a year’s internship at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, but her eyes lit up when Ida told her about Vellore, and she promised to join the staff there as soon as her internship was up.
