Ogino Ginko



Ogino Ginko (荻野吟子); (3 March, 1851 - 23 June, 1913) was a woman physician in Japan.

Ogino was born in Musashi province (present-day Kumagaya city, Saitama prefecture). She married at the age of 16 to the son of the first director of Ashikaga Bank, she soon divorced after contracting gonorrhoea from her husband. After this divorce, she resolved that she would become a doctor. After graduating from Tokyo Women's Normal School (present-day Ochanomizu University), she entered the Juntendo University, which was a private medical academy with an all-male student body. Despite prejudice and much hardship, she graduated in 1882, and after numerous petitions, was finally allowed to take her medical practitioner's examination in 1885.

She opened the Ogino Hospital in Yushima, specializing in obstetrics and gynecology, in Tokyo the same year as the first registered woman doctor in Japan. She also served as staff doctor to the girl’s school of Meiji Gakuin University.

She remarried to a Protestant clergyman and utopian visionary, Yukiyoshi Shikata, in 1890, and went with him to Hokkaidō in 1894, where she ran a medical practice. After her husband died, she came back to Tokyo and in 1908 resumed running a hospital.

She was also active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

Reference

 * Walthall, Ann. The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration. University Of Chicago Press (1989). ISBN 0-226-87237-8