Ida Scudder: The Doctor Who Answered Three Knocks

Ida Scudder grew up in a family of missionaries in India, and she was quite sure she did not want that life for herself. She had seen how hard it was, and as a young woman she went back to America, determined to have an easier, happier life far away from all of it. But God had a surprise waiting for her in India that would change everything.

One night, while Ida was visiting her parents, three men came knocking at the door, one after another. Each had a wife who was very ill and in terrible danger, trying to bring a baby into the world. Ida offered to come at once and help — but each man refused in horror, because in their custom no man who was not family, not even a doctor, could enter the room, and there were no women doctors at all. A woman could only be helped by a woman.

Ida sent for a doctor anyway, but the doctor was a man, and so all three families turned him away. That single, dreadful night, all three of those young women died — not because no one could have saved them, but because there was no woman with the skill to try. Ida could not sleep. She lay awake hearing their story over and over, and by morning she knew that God was calling her, after all, to give her life to India — this time as a doctor.

So Ida went back to America, not to escape now but to study, and she trained as one of the first women doctors of her day. Then she returned to India with her medical bag and a burning purpose: that women should never again die simply because no woman could help them.

Ida began small, seeing a few patients on the veranda of her home, but the need was so vast that the work grew and grew. She built a hospital, and then a great medical school to train Indian women to become doctors and nurses themselves, so that the healing would spread far beyond anything she could ever do alone. Thousands upon thousands of lives were saved through the doors that Ida Scudder opened. She had run away from India as a girl, but three knocks in the night had turned her back — and she had learned that God can take the very thing we most want to escape and make it the bravest, most beautiful work of our lives.