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
4 - Female Missionaries and the Architecture of Women’s 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 started the Introduction with the story of the Kashmir medical mission. To recall: it tells that Reverend Robert Clark and his wife, Elizabeth Mary Browne, visited Kashmir to find an ‘opening’ for evangelistic work in 1864. They were greeted with ‘opposition’, yet Mrs Clark opened a dispensary which ‘was largely attended’, and this signified the need for a medical mission. This story demonstrates the centrality of Mrs Clark to the foundation of the Kashmir hospital and the history of medical mission work more generally. In 1904, Robert Clark even acknowledged that his wife’s dispensary ‘was the commencement of the present Kashmir Medical Mission’. However, missionary publications credited Dr William Jackson Elmslie as the founder of the Kashmir hospital. Some thirty years later, Dr Henry White of the Yazd medical mission recognised Dr George Dodson as the sole designer of the Kerman hospital, disregarding the involvement of Dr Winifred Westlake completely. While the work of female missionaries like Mrs Clark and Westlake was acknowledged in mission accounts, the history of missions was written in a way as though male missionaries were the solo actors. These cases recall Jeffrey Cox’s statement that ‘interpreting missionary records requires constant attention to the multiple levels of exclusion in the narratives’.
This chapter builds on works of feminist scholars and historians of missionary women. It highlights some of the different ways female missionaries were active agents in Persia and British India. It provides information about several female missionaries whose names and activities have remained unknown in scholarship. Moreover, it demonstrates that there was more to female missionary work than most scholarship has recognised. More specifically, it argues that women’s work in mission should include their involvement in the construction of the hospitals (and mission buildings more generally). Female missionaries were not only educators, doctors, nurses, traveller writers and collectors but were also ‘amateur’ architects. It also shows that scholarship on women and architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should include women who set sail for different countries across the British Empire.
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- Emotion, Mission, ArchitectureBuilding Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865-1914, pp. 148 - 181Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023