Dr Kirk pictured here in his days with the Canton Villages Mission in 1915. He joined as a student in 1907, and went out to Canton in 1909.
This picture of him was taken in Fong T'suen in 1915 with the CVM staff, of which this is a crop. After this, he was freed up for voluntary medical service in WWII and he served in France from 1916.
He married Winifred Stubbs in 1918.
He returned to Canton in 1926.
He left the mission in 1928 when he took up a government appointment serving Chinese hospitals in Hong Kong.
After that he took up private practice in surgery and gynaecology there.
When the Japanese invaded in 1941, he was interned in Stanley Camp, and for the rest of the war he delivered invaluable medical service there.
In his retirement years he lived in London and died in 1963, aged 76.
Source: Presbyterian Research Centre NZ
Comments
Thank you for this
Thank you for this post about a grandfather I never knew. As a young woman, Mum left the UK with her newly graduated physician husband for Canada. E W Kirk, a widower, married again. Mum used to say that she and her Dad corresponded by mail regularly, but one day "The letters stopped". I was only 6 years old and barely aware of this grandfather before he died: He would have known of my existence, of course. I got to know my paternal grandparents better through several visits back and forth across the pond until they passed away when I was in my early 20s.
Edward Alexander Cooper, CD, MD, CCFP
Clinical Professor, Faculté de Médecine, Université Laval
Québec, QC, Canada