Emma Osborn Cleaver Parrott

Class of 1883: Medical missionary

(Margaret) Emma Osborn Cleaver was born May 5, 1862, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was the only woman in her Ripon College graduating class when she received a Classical degree in 1883. She also earned an M.A. in 1886 and a teaching certificate. She taught in Milwaukee from 1883-1886 before entering the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses in Baltimore, Maryland, and receiving her nursing diploma in 1891. She spent a year as a private nurse and head nurse in the Johns Hopkins Hospital before leaving to attend the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She received her Doctor of Medicine in 1895.

Parrott practiced medicine in Pennsylvania before leaving Feb. 13, 1903, to become a medical missionary in Shanghai, China. There, she met and married Dr. Frederick Parrott, a British physician in charge of the British American Bible Society.

Her husband was transferred to Kobe, Japan, and Parrott remained a missionary in Japan until 1930. In 1904, she received the Imperial Japanese Medical License to practice medicine freely throughout the Japanese Empire. She conducted a Bible class for young Japanese male students; wrote an English-Japanese memorandum book for daily and weekly prayer; and wrote numerous articles for the British Foreign Bible Society. She retired to Bournemouth, England.

The Emma Osborn Cleaver Collection at Johns Hopkins’ The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives contains her nursing diploma, three student notebooks and correspondence. Her notes document the nursing curriculum of the first class of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School for Nurses, and her notebooks were displayed at the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

She received Ripon’s Distinguished Alumni Citation in 1949. “1889 is a long way back,” she said at the time. “I was the youngest in the class of ’83 and the only girl. I thank you for all your kind wishes and reciprocate them for the college and all its ways.”

She died Dec. 11, 1951.