Christian missionaries had long provided rudimentary health care to colonized peoples, but in the mid-nineteenth century dedicated ‘medical missions’ emerged as a distinct phenomenon. Its proponents felt that medical practitioners were uniquely positioned to access regions and populations that were traditionally closed to missionary influence, and began recruiting doctors and nurses to undertake the dual work of 'healing bodies and saving souls.' Notably, many women became involved in missionary medicine, particularly in gender-segregated societies. This session explores the relationship of religion, medicine, gender, and colonialism through the work of medical missionaries in the late-nineteenth century, comparing their extensive propaganda with their actual fieldwork.

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Discussion Questions:

• How effective were medical missions in spreading European values and beliefs to indigenous peoples?
• Why did women’s health become a central concern of medical missions?
• Were medical missions merely a front for proselytization or did they offer genuine medical benefits to the communities they treated?
• To what extent did medical missionaries serve as agents of empire?

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Required Readings:

*Rama V. Baru, ‘Ch. 10: Women Missionaries in Medical Care and Institution Building in India,’ in Lata Singh and Shashank Shekhar Sinha (eds.) Gender in Modern India, pp.223-240.

*Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840-1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), Ch. 3: ‘Pathologising Heathenism: Discourses of Sickness and the Rise of Medical Missions,’ pp. 79-98

**Rosemary Fitzgerald, ‘A “Peculiar and Exceptional Measure”: The Call for Women Medical Missionaries for India in the Later Nineteenth Century,’ in Robert A. Bickers and Rosemary Seton (eds.), Missionary Encounters: Sources and Issues (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996), pp. 174-196.

*David Hardiman, Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa (New York: Rodopi, 2006), ‘Chapter 2: Seeking Souls through the Eyes of the Blind: The Birth of Medical Missionary Society in Nineteenth Century China,’ pp. 59-86

*Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), ‘Ch. 3: The Great Dispensary in the Sky: Mission Medicine,’ pp. 54-70

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Further Readings:

Rosella Calvi and Federico G. Mantovanelli, 'Long-term Effects of Access to Health Care: Medical Missions in Colonial India,' Jounral of Development Economics 135 (2018), pp. 285-303.

Norman Etherington, ‘Missionary Doctors and African Healers in Mid-Victorian South Africa’ South African Historical Journal 19 (1987), 77-91.

Norman Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine,’ in Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire (Oxford: OUP, 2005), pp. 261-284.

Rosemary Fitzgerald, ‘Rescue and Redemption: The Rise of Female Medical Missionaries in Colonial India During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,’ in Anne Marie Rafferty, Jane Robinson and Ruth Elkan (eds.), Nursing History and the Politics of Welfare (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 64-79.

Charles M. Good, The Steamer Parish: The Rise and Fall of Misisonary Medicine on an African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)

David Hardiman, Missionaries and Their Medicine: A Christian Modernity for Tribal India (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007)

David Hardiman, Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa (New York: Rodopi, 2006)

Michael Jennings, ‘“Healing of Bodies, Salvation of Souls”: Missionary Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika, 1870-1939,’ Journal of Religion in Africa 38 (2008), 27-56

Ryan Livingstone, ‘Colonial Mission and Imperial Tropical Medicine: Livingstone College, London, 1893-1915,’ Social History of Medicine 23 (2010), 549-566.