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 auspices 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.