As a result of the forced departure from Siuyen of Dr. and Mrs. Niels Nielsen in 1941, Dr. Marie Nielsen was transferred from Antung (now Dandong) to Siuyen to take charge of the mission hospital. We will refer to her as "Dr. Marie", since that is how the missionaries referred to her, and doing so helps distinguish her from Dr. Niels Nielsen.
Karen Marie Nielsen was born April 29, 1894. According to D.M.S. publications, she was born in Nidløse. According to a secondary source, she was born in the village of Stenlille near Skuerup, which is on Zealand, the same Danish island on which Copenhagen is located.
According to the secondary source, Marie's parents were Kristen Nielsen, a farmer, and Mathilde Michaelsen, who were involved in the Indre Mission movement, a pietistic Lutheran sect founded in Stenlille in 1861. The secondary source says Marie grew up in Holbæk, which is also on Zealand.
At the age of 18, Marie felt called to be a missionary. In 1919, she graduated from Haslev High School -- the same folk high school from which Anna Bøg had graduated ten years earlier. In 1927, Marie obtained her medical degree at the University of Copenhagen after which she spent a short time in Scotland and England.
In November, 1927, the D.M.S. sent Dr. Marie to Manchuria. She traveled to China by ship together with Anna Bøg during the latter's return from her 1926-1927 fundraising furlough.
By 1932, a separate women’s hospital was completed at Antung and Dr. Marie was put in charge, overseeing a Chinese doctor (Dr. Pi) and a Danish nurse (Andrea Nielsen).
From May 1934 until August 1935, Dr. Marie was in Denmark on home leave (furlough), then returned to Antung.
After her 1941 transfer to Siuyen, Dr. Marie labored there throughout the remainder of the Japanese occupation and Second World War.
In 1944, there was a typhoid outbreak. The Japanese required Siuyen hospital to treat typhoid patients from a nearby forced-labor camp, in spite of the danger to the ordinary patients. Both patients and staff caught the disease, which spread throughout the hospital. Dr. Marie was in charge of the disinfections as well as the medical care. The conditions were desperate because of inadequate food and drug supplies. Dr. Marie contracted the disease but survived.
After the end of World War II, no replacement for Dr. Marie could be found, so she remained in Siuyen. In 1945 the Russians came into Manchuria and a year later the Chinese communists. The communists burdened Siuyen Hospital by filling it with patients from the army. Dr. Marie worked seven days a week under increasingly chaotic conditions.
In 1947, Dr. Marie was able to return to the hospital in Antung where she remained, despite harassment by the communists, until 1951. The communists demanded free treatment, used the hospital as a base for political indoctrination, maligned and harassed the missionaries, and even imprisoned several of them.
After returning to Denmark in 1951, Dr. Marie left again in 1952 for Tanzania where she served in two mission hospitals. She contracted malaria, returned to Denmark in 1959, and died in Copenhagen on September 19, 1968.
Primary sources:
D.M.S. Missionary Album
Gullach-Jensen, Thyra; D.M.S. i Manchuriet; (D.M.S., Copenhagen, 1937), pp. 62-65.
Secondary source:
Nielsen, Estrid; "Marie Nielsen", Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon (online). (Additional commentary about Dr. Marie is available at the linked website.)
Image:
Photograph of Dr. Marie Nielsen from one of the D.M.S. missionary albums, courtesy of Kirsten Berggreen Buch.
All D.M.S. items used with permission.
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