Gladys Smithwick

After medical school, Smithwick worked at the Catawba Sanatorium in Virginia,^[5] and the Rhode Island State Sanatorium.^[6] She spent much of her career as a medical missionary with the American Southern Presbyterian Mission. She was posted in China from 1929 to 1935, where she was co-director of a women's hospital at Suzhou.^[7][4] She was an anesthesiologist^[4][8] and an active clubwoman in Lexington, Kentucky, in the 1930s and 1940s.^[9][10][11]

Smithwick hoped to return to China after World War II;^[8][12] instead, she studied French in Belgium, and worked at a leprosarium^[13] in the Kasai Province of the Belgian Congo, from 1949 to 1963.^[14][15]

On furloughs in the United States, she spoke about her work at Presbyterian churches.^[16][17][18]

Smithwick died in 1964, aged 66 years, at a hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina.^[13][14][19] There is a file of her letters in the Presbyterian Historical Society archives.^[20]