A young doctor takes a post halfway around the world, healing the diseased and wounded despite war, revolution, and foreign occupation. These are the memoirs of an adventurous woman - a dedicated healer of formidable talent and great goodness. Told in her own words and illustrated with rare photographs and maps, Hyla Doc describes her internment in a Japanese prison camp, her eventual repatriation and her dramatic return to China to reclaim her hospital from the Japanese after the war.

"Hyla S. Watters' memoir of two and a half decades as a woman surgeon on the Yangtze provides an insightful, colorful record of China's troubled era before the Communist revolution. An American teacher of medicine and modernization, this humanist observer and gifted raconteur informs and startles with salient images of a unique people reeling at the loss of their old order, struggling against despair and surviving to build anew."
          — Fred W. Drake, Professor of Chinese Histor, University of Massachusetts.

"A reliable source on the interaction between various socio-political forces in China during the turbulent years . . . 1924 to 1949. The fascinating story of [the efforts of] a selfless and determined individual to bring modern medicine to China, written with the precision of the hand that holds a scalpel, but in many places as beautiful sa a piece of Chinese poetry."
          — Peter Wan, Professor, East China Normal University

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