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Zhou Meiyu

Chinese nurse

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 9, 2026
Entity authorityQ24837231 ↗
Source-derived summary

Zhou Meiyu (Chinese: 周美玉) (1910–2001) was a Chinese nurse, known as "the mother of military nursing in China" and "among the most influential Chinese nurses of the early twentieth century". She was the founder of the Army School of Nursing at the Emergency Medical Service Training School in Guiyang, a strong proponent of military nursing during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War, and the first woman in the Republic of China to attain the rank of major general (少將, shaojing). Xu Nanli, an adjunct professor at National Yang-Ming University who studied under her, described her as the "Nightingale of China".

Early life and education

Zhou was born in Beijing in 1910 and attended Peiyuan Primary School, Bridgeman Girls High School, and Yanjing University, all Christian missionary schools in Beijing. She is originally from a town just south of Hangzhou. In 1926, she entered a medical training program run jointly by Yanjing University and the Nursing School of Peking Union Medical College (PUMC). She earned a degree and her Registered Nurse License from PUMC in 1930. She worked as head nurse at Cemtral Clinic.

She was awarded two fellowships by the Rockefeller Foundation's China Medical Board to study in the United States. In 1933, she studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a B.A. in public health and health education.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Zhou Meiyu” as chinese nurse. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1910, 2001, 1926, 1930—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1910. The account is most persuasive where Zhou, Meiyu and Chinese can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as chinese nurse. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24837231. VIAF identifies the subject as 63895871. The Library of Congress control number is nr95008006. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1910, 2001, 1926 and 1930.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Zhou Meiyu”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Zhou Meiyu primary sources, Zhou Meiyu archive and Zhou research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Zhou Meiyu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.