Clifford H. Phillips

Clifford H. Phillips, nee Lei Houtian, was adopted at the age of two by Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips and is fluent in Mandarin (Putonghua). He is the author of China Beckons: An Insight to the ...

Lady Named Thunder, The
A Biography of Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips, 1876-1951

Clifford H. Phillips

The Lady Named Thunder has won the first Asia Biennial Award, which was bestowed by the Asia Pacific Accord of Canada in a high- profile ceremony on August 27, 2004.

Not only was Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips one of the first women to be educated as a medical doctor at the University of Manchester, but she also was a pioneering medical missionary who served in China at a time when women missionaries were usually dutiful wives, and certainly not “suffragist” founders of teaching hospitals. Unmarried and independent of any authority save her own conscience, Dr. Phillips established hospitals and clinics for several Christian missions. Overlapping the era in which the Imperial system collapsed, China was invaded and occupied by Japan, and the outbreak of the Communist revolution, the life story of Margaret Phillips reflects the great events that transformed China in the first half of the twentieth century.

Reviews

"Warlords, famine, opium scandals, girl child abandonment, collapse of the old Empire, the cruelties of the Japanese occupation, she was there for it all, and raised her child Clifford (her biographer) in Peking, Unlike Canadian Dr. Bethune, she did not stay for the communist takeover but her story covers the more interesting time in the history of that troubled mass of people. A bit of a gem for history buffs." - Ron McIsaac, Island News, Victoria

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