Dr. Rosetta Sherwood Hall was born in 1865 in Liberty, New York, the daughter of a well-to-do Christian farming family. She obtained a teacher's certificate at the age of sixteen, and after teaching at local schools for a few years, was sent in 1890 to the remote far eastern land of Korea to devote her life to medicine and missionary work under the auspi-ces of the Woman's Medical Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She would go on to serve as a medical missionary there for forty-three years.