Mary West Niles

[citation needed] In 1875, she graduated from Elmira College, and spent the next three years in New York city teaching in public schools and doing mission work.

Niles, following her commission from the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions as a medical missionary in China, joined the hospital on 1882, while John Glasgow Kerr was in charge.

[4] On her arrival, October 19, 1882, in Canton, she lived with Harriet Noyes at the True Light Seminary where she started studying the Cantonese dialect and gave some assistance to Kerr in her spare time.

Niles started working at the Canton Hospital in 1883 as superintendent of the women's ward when Kerr was forced to retreat to Hong Kong for a short time.

Due to her excellent accomplishments, Thomson recommended that Niles be appointed lady physician to the hospital at a meeting of the Canton Medical Missionary Society on January 1, 1885.

The medical society, convinced of the suitability of the proposal, appointed Niles as a formal doctor in charge of women and child patients at the hospital.

[citation needed] The local governments, generous societies, and charitable individuals did not have any education or remedy programs for people with physical or mental disabilities.

Niles identified this miserable situation, and her interest for the blind began in 1889 when a little waif of three years was picked up from an ash heap and brought to the hospital for treatment.

Niles, determined to provide a place to care for these blind girls, wrote in 1892 to the secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions to apply for assistance.

She taught and took charge of the obstetric department at the Hackett Medical College, founded by Fulton, and its hospital until in 1923 when she devoted herself entirely to the School for the Blind.

She made a monumental achievement when she translated the Braille writing system into the Cantonese language, for which Mary Nile's alma mater, the Elmira College, awarded her a degree of L.L.D in 1917.

[16][17] Her colleagues paid her this tribute: "Into dark places, full of pain and suffering she went, taking light and relief and beauty, and most of all, a loving heart.