Yin May founded the country's main maternity hospital during the Japanese occupation (1942–1945), and she co-founded the wartime medical and nursing schools (1943–1945).

Yin May was born in September 1900[note 1] to a well-to-do family in Prome (Pyay) in British Burma.

(Her father U Kyaw was then the Deputy Commissioner of Prome,[1][2] a mid-level official in the colonial administration, and later became the Secretary of Home and Defence by the early 1940s.

After two years at Rangoon College, she went to study medicine at the University of Calcutta on a scholarship in 1919, and graduated with an MB (and a gold medal in pathology) in 1925.

[1][2] She then spent a year at Rangoon General Hospital as a staff physician before leaving for the UK for graduate studies in obstetrics and gynecology in 1926.

[5] Back in Rangoon, Yin May started as the Assistant Medical Superintendent of Lady Dufferin Maternity Hospital in 1930.

[5] As the deputy head of a major hospital, she had joined the upper echelons of the tiny colonial era medical community made up mainly of foreign-born physicians and specialists that existed primarily in Rangoon (Yangon).

[note 2]) Yin May was instrumental in the expansion of modern obstetrics and gynecology (OG/OBGYN) practices in Burma; she was the first person to perform the Caesarian section in the country.

In 1937, she published her most famous research paper in The Indian Medical Gazette on amoebic vaginitis, which was subsequently named May's disease.

In the beginning, she had no staff with any OG experience; she was assigned just one novice physician Kyee Paw and a few nurses.

[11] The maternity hospital proved a lifeline to many would-be mothers, and became a training ground for a new generation of several young physicians and nurses.

[13] Having a local RCOG recognized hospital made it much easier for Burmese OGs to pursue FRCOG fellowships.