Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Abbreviations and Transliteration
- Introduction: Medical Mission Work and Building Trust
- 1 Life Before and Outside the Mission Hospitals
- 2 Missionaries and the Development of Novel Hospital Desig
- 3 Hospital Visitors and a Hospital for a Whole Family
- 4 Female Missionaries and the Architecture of Women’s Hospitals
- 5 Medical Missions and the Anglo-Russian Rivalry
- Conclusion: Affecting Bodies, Saving Souls
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Life Before and Outside the Mission Hospitals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Abbreviations and Transliteration
- Introduction: Medical Mission Work and Building Trust
- 1 Life Before and Outside the Mission Hospitals
- 2 Missionaries and the Development of Novel Hospital Desig
- 3 Hospital Visitors and a Hospital for a Whole Family
- 4 Female Missionaries and the Architecture of Women’s Hospitals
- 5 Medical Missions and the Anglo-Russian Rivalry
- Conclusion: Affecting Bodies, Saving Souls
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I need hardly to say that the details of the work vary in different countries, but as a rule, the Mission is commenced by the opening of an out-patient dispensary, the Gospel being preached to the patients who come together; then, sooner or later, an in-patient department is added.
This statement, made by Dr Arthur Lankester of the Peshawar medical mission in 1900, suggests that medical missions were established in a step-by-step manner. First, the missionaries opened outpatient dispensaries, after which they started inpatient departments. Dr Urania Latham (Mrs Napier Malcolm) of the Yazd medical mission echoed this statement in her book, Children of Persia, in 1911; she asserted, ‘[a]s a rule a dispensary is started first, to which out-patients can come to get medicine and have their hurts attended to. Later a hospital is opened.’ Lankester and Latham’s statements are comparable to John Barton’s, the CMS’s secretary in British India, in 1874:
We do not care in India to have the material fabric until we first obtain the spiritual fabric, consisting of living stones. This has always been the principle of the Church Missionary Society, and I hope always will be. It is very easy to pull down a mud chapel and build a stone building in its place when your congregation has increased from 50 to 500, or from 500 to 1000.
The CMS advocated modesty in architecture throughout the nineteenth century. But Lankester and Latham’s use of the term ‘as a rule’ was more complex than it might seem at first sight. They did not necessarily refer to the CMS’s principles; rather, they pointed to the specificities of medical mission work, particularly in British India, China and the Middle East. Not only the CMS medical missions, but also medical missions of the ABCFM, the London Missionary Society (LMS), the SPG, the Christian Missions in Many Lands (CMML) and the German-based Sudan Pionier Mission (SPM), to name but a few, were started as small outpatient dispensaries, followed by an inpatient department in rented buildings and, after several years, a purposebuilt structure.
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- Information
- Emotion, Mission, ArchitectureBuilding Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865-1914, pp. 34 - 66Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023