Ailie May Spencer Gale, (1878-1958) was an American physician. She served as a medical missionary in China under commission from the Methodist Episcopal Board of Missions from 1908-1950 alongside her husband Rev. Francis Gale, a religious missionary. Committed to a lifetime of unpaid social activism, Gale's work emphasized an approach to patient care that focused on preventative care and public health, humane treatment, and consideration for the whole patient, entailing concern for physical, spiritual, and intellectual needs. She also had evangelical motives and sought to promote the status of Chinese women.
Gale's years of service in China coincided with major political developments of the time, including the Chinese Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Sino-American alliance during World War II, and implementation of a Communist government. The political and cultural climates created by these events had a great impact on Gale's work both in determining the needs she was to respond to and in influencing interactions between the Gales and the Chinese populations they served.
Gale kept active correspondence with her supporters back in the American home field. As a female surgeon in the twentieth century who wrote about her medical successes and spoke at public events, Gale broke into in fields dominated by men in the twentieth century—medicine and public speaking—and gave credibility to women's capability for professionalism and leadership. Her readers were encouraged to consider women as active players in the international realm rather than solely restricted to the domestic sphere. At the same time, historians have noted Gale's role in uplifting upper-middle class white Protestant women at the expense of Chinese women, whose religious practices (or lack thereof) and non-Western medicine she considered inferior.
Gale returned to New York in 1950 and died in 1958 at the age of 79.