In the history of medicine, Susanna Carson Rijnhart is one of the names that keeps returning.
The record lists Susanna Carson Rijnhart as Canadian medical doctor, Protestant missionary, and Tibetan explorer (1868–1908).
Susanna Carson Rijnhart was born at Chatham-Kent in 1868. Her recorded nationality is Canada.
Anaesthesia, antisepsis and germ theory arrived within fifty years and made modern surgery possible for the first time.
The test of medical work is whether practice changed, not whether the argument was elegant.
That the work was done from Canada matters: hospitals, training and research funding are unevenly distributed, and they decide which questions can be asked.
Susanna Carson Rijnhart died in 1908, aged 40. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
