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Making Doctors and Nurses for Jesus: Medical Missionary Stories and American Children1

Posted on: Wednesday, 5 October 2005, 06:00 CDT

By Schoepflin, Rennie B

The December 1899 issue of Our Little Friend, a Seventh-day Adventist Sabbath school paper containing moral instruction, missionary stories, and the upcoming week's Bible study lessons, related the following story to its young readers:

A little Chinese boy who lived with his father in a little town was taken very sick. Now in China when one is sick and a Chinese doctor comes, he sometimes does very cruel things. The Chinese think that when one is sick, some evil spirit is in him and must be driven out. [Although] the boy cried hard because of the pain, he did not get any better; and one day a friend who came to see him said to [the boy's father,] Mr. Mul'ber-ry:-2 "Why don't you take the boy to the mis'sion-a-ries at Lahor? They can cure disease.""No, no," said an-oth'er friend, "don't take him to the mis'sion-a-ries. They make the lenses of their opera-glasses out of children's eyes."

Time passed, the boy did not improve, and finally in desperation the father placed his son on the only mode of transportation he had, a wheelbarrow, and embarked on the long trek to the missionary clinic in Lahore. When they arrived at the clinic, however, the father's fears about the mission doctors returned, and he could not even bring himself to knock on the door. As he sat on the stoop, forlorn and dejected, "the door'keep-er of the house came out, and saw at once that he was an old friend and neighbor. How delighted the weary man was! A moment before he had been so sad, and lonely, and here was help."

When the father finished relating his story, the "friend replied, 'Yes, indeed; the mis'sion-a-ries are good and kind, and they will heal your son.'" But of course the missionary doctors and nurses did not just treat the boy's medical problems. As they "nursed the sick child, they told his father about the great Phy-si'cian, and he learned to know and love Him. So Mr. Mul'ber-ry went home a Christian; and there is no better man in all that country than the father who took his sick son a hundred and fifty miles on a wheel'bar-row for help."3

When medical missionaries returned "home" to America, they disembarked with a variety of foreign objects tucked away inside their baggage, but they also arrived with exotic, shocking, and sometimes self-contradictory ideas hidden within their mission stories. If a child goes to a Chinese doctor, "sometimes [the doctor] does very cruel things" to them. And as the Mission Dayspring (Congregational) reported, when a child in China "is sick, the doctor may puncture it with long needles, or give it horrid med'i-cines, which do no good and may do much harm. Perhaps the child gets well and seems to have a fair chance of living. But it will be allowed to chew green fruit, cu'cumbers, and melons, eating rind and seeds; and the fact that any child can live in that way seems a miracle."4 Thus American children learned that heathen parents may love their children, but their ignorance of proper care often put those same children in jeopardy. Such stories portrayed to children the supposedly obvious advantages of the American ways of life, which were superior to the ways of the heathen who "visited witch doctors and prayed to the devil."

This examination of medical mission stories corroborates the presence of the pervasive dualisms that Edward Said identified as integral to Orientalism and provides further evidence to support and extend Herb Swanson's assertion that missionary literature often described the "non-Christian world as being immoral, benighted, idolatrous, pagan, barbaric, infidel, and so on down a long list of other terms that may be summarized best in that old-fashioned word 'heathenism.'"5 But mission stories also contained potentially confusing images as well. Consider the geographical, linguistic, and technological characteristics of the mythic China forming within the mind of a child who aheard the story related above-a benighted land in Punjab's Lahor, peopled by fathers named Mulberry, who transported children in wheelbarrows.

Not only, however, did such stories form a child's view of the supposed ignorance and superstition rampant throughout the mission lands, but they contributed to the formation of her understanding of the racial inferiority of dirty peoples with "skin as black as coal" and "eyes as brown as the mud in the village streets" and to the gendered roles that medical doctors (male curers) and nurses (female caretakers) should play in bringing scientific medicine to "heathen lands." As a missionary A-B-C exercise for primary children suggested, "D is for doctors, who for Jesus' sake / Make sick children well, curing many / an ache." But "N stands for nurses with caps clean and / white, / Filling the hearts of the sick with de- / light."6

Fueled by a variety of cultural and academic impulses, a resurgence of scholarly interest in American Christian missions developed during the last half of the twentieth century.7 Scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, sociology, religious studies, and cultural studies, have enriched our understanding of what missions and missionaries meant to both "sending" and "receiving" cultures. Intellectual historians probed the meaning of national identity as revealed in missionary literature and institution building, and they mined a surprisingly rich body of nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century mission theory. And social examinations of the supposed monolithic American mission movement revealed instead richly nuanced communities characterized by denominational, ethnic, and gender diversities.8

Especially provocative have been the ways in which first- and third-world postcolonialism has influenced how scholars have explored the complex ways missionaries and converts mediated the formation of cultural identities in an imperialist and postimperialist world.9 We now understand more clearly the variety of cultural artifacts, often unnoticed, that were exchanged in these cross-cultural encounters, and we understand more clearly that power relationships between the so-called first and third world rarely flowed in only one direction.10 American foreign missionaries, for example, took more than "the truth about Jesus" to the heathen; they exported much of their Protestant-republican-capitalist-modernist culture as well. And they in turn imported non-Western folklore, religious narratives, and the aesthetic of the so-called primitive and vernacular art of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.11

Among the things late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century American missionaries took with them to "foreign lands," scientific medicine often stood out for both missionaries and indigenous peoples.12 In the middle of the nineteenth century the pathbreaking missionary work of Peter Parker, M.D. (1804-88) in China and Clara A. Swain, M.D. (1834-1910) in India ushered in an age of medical missions that made the missionary physician "the representative of all that was most admired in the later stages of the modern missionary movement."13 By 1899 American missionary physicians holding regular medical diplomas numbered 338, over a third (127) of whom were women, and the world field comprised 348 hospitals, 774 dispensaries, and 45 medical schools.14 James S. Dennis, early- twentieth-century student of American foreign missions, concluded that of the benefits of missions none, other than the gospel of Jesus itself, "surpasses in value the establishment of modern medical and surgical practice among ignorant, deluded, and suffering peoples." For "medical ministry is not only a physical benefit, but also an evangelistic agency of great power. Pain has a message to the soul as well as an admonition to the body, and the medical missionary seeks to impress its spiritual lesson at the same time that he mitigates its physical pangs/

Nonetheless, despite such generally held positive views of medical missions, early-twentieth-century debates arose within and between liberal and evangelical Protestant missionaries over the extent to which such so-called humanitarian extensions of Western culture should play a role in fulfilling the gospel commission. Was the healing attributed to medicine a sufficient justification in and of itself for Christian mission? Should it only serve as an entering wedge that would allow an explicit witness to the sacrifice of Jesus and a call to accept him as Lord and Savior? Or, should healed bodies and saved souls be understood as simply two sides of salvation's coin? For the authors of the sources I have examined for this study, the latter two answers predominated. As one author put it, "I almost think that the medicine bottle in the hand of one [of] our Missionary doctors can open the doors of more heathen homes than any other key in the whole world!"16 And as you may recall, we were left to imagine that the little Chinese boy got well, but the story explicitly declared that the father "went home a Christian."

Indigenous peoples often responded with curiosity, distrust, and fear when confronted by the strange ways of the mission doctorsthey may even have thought that the doctors stole their children's eyes for opera glasses or microscope lenses and captured their spirits in black boxes (cameras). However, th\ey also soon recognized that although missionary medicine may have healed some diseases and could sometimes be used to their advantage in political and cultural power struggles, it also often proved to be incompatible with native healing, undermined cultural, social, and political authority, and arrived entangled with a Christian worldview not always friendly to indigenous religious sensibilities.17

However, my primary purpose here is not to discuss what American medical missionaries took with them to foreign lands or how the receiving peoples understood them. I am less interested in recovering the facts of medical missions than I am in exploring the mixed messages regarding healing, superstition, race, and gender that medical missionary stories transmitted to American children. Remarkably consistent across denominations, these double messages revealed a common and major set of confusions gripping liberal and conservative Protestants alike.18 Are non-Christians superstitious devil worshipers or children of God whose cultures should be respected and valued? Should there be any accommodation between Western, Christian medicine and indigenous health practices? Can only Western boys (and some girls) grow up to be missionary doctors? Can only native girls be trained to be nurses, while native boys can become dispensers and surgical assistants? And maybe most persistent, what should be the primary purpose of medical mission-a means to the end of Christian conversion, or Christian humanitarianism as a selfsufficient end in itself?

I. RETELLING, REENACTING, AND REINVENTING: CHILDHOOD ENCOUNTERS WITH MEDICAL MISSIONS

I still vividly remember the tall, slender, white-haired man with the versatile voice who mesmerized us in the junior division at camp meeting with his Burma medical missionary stories. I was ten or eleven at the time, and my younger sister and I had already heard many of Eric B. Hare's "Jungle Stories" by way of our family's reel- to-reel tape recorder. "Silver and the Snake" was great, but for me, "Clever Queen" topped them all.

A so-called medical evangelist, "Dr." Hare had graduated from the nurse's training course at the Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium in Sydney, Australia, before embarking in 1915 with his new bride for mission service among the Karen people of Burma (see Figure 1). A gospel of healthful living, hydrotherapy, and an apocalyptic "endtime" message had distinguished Adventist foreign missions since the 1880s. Adventists considered the medical missionary impulse to be the "right arm of the message." Their commitment to that belief led them to expand their two hospitals and sanitariums, staffed by ten physicians in 1880, into 152 hospitals and sanitariums, 300 clinics and dispensaries, and thousands of physicians, dentists, nurses, and allied health professionals worldwide by the 1990s.

But I knew none of that in 1962; what I knew about Burma, the Karen, medical missions, and Dr. and Ma Ma Rabbit, as the Karen called the Hares, was what I had learned from the "Jungle Stories" and, in particular, "Clever Queen." And what was Clever Queen's world like? Fortunately, my sister and I had a map of it that arrived on the covers of our 1957 edition of Hare's 1936 publication entitled Clever Queen: A Tale of the Jungle and of Devil Worshipers19 (see Figure 2). Situated next to the Kawkeyet Pagoda on the Salween River, surrounded by jungle, tigers, snakes, and elephants, sat the Hares' Ohndaw Dispensary and School. The Karen cut bamboo and planted rice, used the rivers as roads, and lived in bamboo shelters roofed with grass. The map also identified the location of several key episodes in the story: Clever Queen's birthplace, the hideout on the mountainside, and Clever Queen's new home.

FIG. 1. Eric B. Hare. Karen Mission Station, and native assistants.

We learned of the beliefs and practices of the Karen from the text, where we were told that they believed that the odor of frying food "goes into their blood and produces boils and abscesses if they smell it while they have sores or pimples."20 We discovered that they believed that the strength of Dr. Hare's medicine came from the picture of the rabbit he had attached to the bottles he dispensed, and we were instructed that one "can't help but feel sorry for the little children who are born among the devil worshipers."2

To us, such superstitious beliefs about the origin of disease and the magical influence of medicine bottle labels seemed odd and kind of quaint. But devil worship was something else. We did not personally know any devil worshippers, but our supernaturalist, evangelical worldview made it clear to us that the devil existed and could entice boys and girls into his service. And we had been told that Ouija boards foretold the future for the same devilish reasons that the chicken bones cast by the heathen did-odd and scary, perhaps, but real, not like the boogeyman under the bed. The authors of medical missionary stories not only steered their little listeners through exotic places like Burma. They also charted cosmological realms in which spiritual forces of good and evil struggled for the bodies and souls of little children both at home and in far off lands.

In contrast to these and other Karen beliefs and practices, we learned that the Hares, aided by converted Karen assistants, warned against the use of disgusting betel nut, taught the importance of proper hygiene and diet, dispensed medicines, pulled teeth, and healed Clever Queen of her horrible boils. They operated a jungle school where Clever Queen gained freedom from "the devils" and learned to read and write like "the God worshipers." And, of course, the Hares preached the gospel of Jesus, taught the doctrines of Adventism, and baptized many, including Clever Queen, into the church.

My sister, I, and countless other Protestant children listened to thousands of missionary stories, but what did we make of such tales, what impact did they exert on our lives, and did the results bear any resemblance to what we were supposed to get out of the stories? Adults tell stories to children and write children's literature, and they usually have clear intentions for what they relate. Not only do they want to communicate information, invoke emotional responses, change behavior, and instill values, but, as Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty so aptly put it, they want to create community-"to relive, together, the stories that they already know, stories about themselves." 2 This impulse to link children to storytellers and to their pasts by transmitting a community's mythology may have been doubly imperative for the tellers of missionary stories for whom the universalizing character of Christianity should lead to the recognition, confrontation, and transformation of the non-Christian and his mythos. These stories were about what it meant to be a part of the Western, Christian community. Only superficially were they about the "other" and never about the transformation of the Christian healer into the "other." The storytellers rarely legitimized the exotic details of foreign lands by seating them firmly within their mythic otherness. Instead, in these stories natives sleepwalked through their existences, unaware of the universal struggle between good and evil of which they were a part, until awakened from their trance by the missionary preacher, teacher, or doctor. In short, medical missionary stories brought comfort to their listeners, legitimized Western cultural attitudes and values, and solidified a commitment to Western medicine.

FIG. 2. Clever Queen's world.

FIG. 2. Clever Queen's world, Clever Queen, front cover.

But what did children get from these stories? The supposed impossibility of answering that question has led some literary critics to conclude that there is no such thing as children's literature; instead, children's literature is literature written and purchased by adults for the edification or enjoyment of an adult's imagined child.23 While one acknowledges much truth in this view, short of a sort of pedosolipsism, how might such a conclusion direct an analysis of the impact of medical mission stories on Protestant American children? One might begin by reconstructing a "story" of the medical mission story. Medical missionaries transformed their experiences into stories and illustrated texts, which in turn they transmitted orally or in written form to audiences largely comprised of children. Historians and other scholars then brought their own experiences and critical tools to an "analysis" of the stories and constructed other stories about what they thought children had learned. This should be familiar terrain; however, we often forget the nature of its contours. Hence the importance, I believe, of an attempt to revisit our childhood encounters with medical mission stories as a rhetorical device whereby we reenact their telling and reinvent their meanings for our imagined children. However, while such playful re-imagining or the psychoanalysis of mission storytellers and their young audiences might be enlightening, I still think that the somewhat old-fashioned tools of textual and contextual analysis, although unable to recover the truth, can also point one helpfully toward meanings.

II. NARRATIVE STRUCTURE, FORM, AND CONTENT

This paper presents conclusions drawn from a content analysis of scores of medical missionary stories read by and told to children and youth in the United States from about 1880 to 1980. I have examined a wide variety of Protestant denominational and interdenominational juvenile and children's literature-books, plays, Sunday school papers, story sermons, and teacher's missionary guides and study helps.24 The nature of missionary literature followed the pattern established in the nineteenth century for the publication of materials devoted to the religious education of American young people. Spearheaded by the Sunday school movemen\t and the American Sunday School Union, antebellum American religious educators called for a juvenile literature characterized by a clear moral and religious character, graded and adapted to children's development, of high literary quality, and written in American English and about American people and places.25 During the second half of the nineteenth century, scores of books and weekly and monthly periodicals appeared, published by the Union, other interdenominational unions, and individual denominations for the purpose of covering the "whole field of education as related to religion," including domestic and foreign missions.26 Given that American Sunday schools enrolled an estimated twenty-five million members in 1917, missionary stories reached a large audience with the potential for significant and widespread influence.27

The evidence makes clear that the authors and publishers of children's missionary literature borrowed extensively from each other, suggesting that neither denominational loyalty nor theological parochialism played a significant role in the content of the stories. And my content analysis of the stories bears this out. Even Our Little Friend, published by Seventh-day Adventists fiercely defensive of their sectarian theology and generally opposed to ecumenical mission practices, directly borrowed stories, with attribution, from the mission literature of nearly a dozen missionary publications representing several denominations, including the Children's Missionary (Presbyterian Church in the United States), the Little Missionary (Roman Catholic), the Little Worker, and the Children's Missionary Friend (Methodist Episcopal Church). And given that many of the stories emerged from an oral tradition associated with camp meetings, youth congresses, and Sabbath schools, stories took on a life of their own, merging and recycling from teller to teller and author to author, each adapting them to her own particular purpose. For example, key elements of the 1899 story with which I opened this paper reappeared in one of Margaret T. Applegarth's stories published in her 1917 junior series collection of Missionary Stories for Little Folks.28 Despite this narrative ecumenicism, however, particular denominational concerns surfaced in the framing of the stories: for example, in identifying to which mission hospitals offerings should be sent, to which denomination the healed converted, or to which mission dispensary one should aspire for service.

Medical missionaries and their stories represented only one subset of the vast missionary literature created for informing and instructing the home front during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And these medical stories shared many of the same characteristics of the missionary story genre-descriptions of foreign lands, the founding of mission stations and activities, the heroic missionaries confronting dangerous animals and often initially hostile natives, and lessons the reader could learn from the mission experience that would enhance their walk with God and move them to devote money, time, or career to mission service.29

The experiences of medical missionaries appeared in a variety of contexts and served several purposes. In some cases general missionary stories made passing references to Western or native medical practices or to the importance of medical missions. For example, W. A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, and Duke K. McCall, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, traveled around the world ca. 1950, visiting, preaching, and baptizing under the auspices of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Their story of that trip, published as Passport to the World, described a Nigerian drugstore in which, instead of "shelves of neatly labeled bottles," they "saw displayed on the ends of sticks, dried bird heads, dead rats, and other small animals in various stages of decay. African natives boil such stuff and drink the liquid concoction. It is no wonder that the sick so often die. That kind of treatment would kill even a well man. The African cure for small pox is to throw an old broom on top of the house and cast another old broom in the yard. The ineffectiveness of this treatment is proclaimed by entire villages which have been wiped out by smallpox epidemics." They also visited a hospital and leper colony in Ogbomosho, Nigeria, in which "there was so little equipment that, as Southern Baptists who sponsor the hospital, we were embarrassed." Nonetheless, "the important thing is that the sick are healed, the hopeless find hope, the unclean find friends. The Christ who cleansed lepers on the dusty roadside in Galilee long ago is still doing business through his followers today."30

Collections of short stories, anecdotes, and story-sermons, such as Children's Missionary Story Sermons, often included stories that featured medical missionaries.31 These stories briefly related an incident in the life of a medical missionary to illustrate the importance of emulating the missionary's bravery, trust in God, and service to others. Pastors or Sunday school teachers used them to capture the attention of children and youth and to focus their attention on the virtues of hard work, doing good, being a friend to Jesus, trusting God, and giving money to help the sick in foreign lands.

But how did the storytellers navigate their little listeners through the mis`sion lands and introduce them to the people who needed medical assistance and the "true God"? Their longer narratives followed several main types: biography-autobiography, ethnographycultural geography, and travelogue.32 I have yet to discover stories in which the medical missionary "went native," that is, intentionally merged indigenous healing with Western medicine. Hare's use of the rabbit label appears to have been more a marketing hook than a genuine accommodation to the Karen's animistic worldview. Nonetheless, as historian Luise White has noted, for the natives the meaning of dispensed pills and ointments "was almost never the same as missionaries intended," and missionaries sometimes touted their own medicines as "superior magic."33

Both the story of the little Chinese boy and the story of Clever Queen illustrate a biographical form in which the author presented both the external experiences and internal states of his characters. Although we cannot be certain from the texts themselves that these had been real children who experienced the events precisely as narrated, the author presented them as such. In the case of Clever Queen, further authorial authority derived from the fact that Hare himself was a central participant in the story. Moreover, because he lived among the "natives" as a medical missionary, we trust his views to be more than superficial, and we are more likely to assume him to be a friendly outsider. One of the powers of such a narrative form lies in the way in which the listener can vicariously enter into the characters' experiences and sympathize with their circumstances, no matter how strange their beliefs or practices might seem.

Australian medical missionary Paul White (see Figure 3) also followed this literary form when he turned to write the internationally famous "Jungle Doctor" books after "his wife's health forced him to leave Africa."34 Published throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, this series of nearly two dozen books traces White's adventures as a medical missionary serving at a Church Missionary Society (CMS, Anglican) hospital in central Tanganyika during the 1930s. Published into the 1960s with titles like Jungle Doctor (1942, first in the series), Jungle Doctor Operates (1944), and Jungle Doctor Attacks Witchcraft (1947), these books, reissued by Eerdmans in the 1950s and Moody Press in the 1970s, reached a wide-ranging, juvenile American audience with the adventures of medical missionary service.

FIG. 3. Dr. Paul White and native assistant Daudi.

All of the key elements of medical missionary stories appeared in the "Jungle Doctor" series: the daily routines of mission life and the often quaint and naive customs of the natives; the dangers of weather, snakes, wild animals, and violent tribesmen; rampant but often needless disease and suffering; shortages of supplies and inadequate working conditions; continual struggles for authority with witch doctors; and the reward of seeing lives changed through the power of Jesus and Western medicine. However, the books stand out for their detailed descriptions of doctoring-the treatments and surgeries under the less than ideal conditions of the bush-and their comprehensive exploration of the integration of curing and converting. Readers discovered just how tough it could be to practice Western medicine without the institutional and technological infrastructures of the modern world. But they also could glimpse the sense of both personal accomplishment and thanks to God that came with having innovated, adapted, and prayed oneself to success.35

This sense of partnership with God became most apparent in the way White interwove spiritual and physical healing. A life-giving blood transfusion echoed Bwana Yesu Kristo's blood sacrifice, failure to follow instructions to keep a bandage over an ulcer got one into trouble just like "if we do not obey the words of God," and when parents demanded ointment for their child's serious burn that required a transfusion, Dr. White took his assistant aside and said

"My friend, this is not the way that the child should be treated. This is not the medicine that brings life. All we are doing is covering up the wound; we are not curing the root of the trouble. The child's relations are like those who would sit and cover their sins by putting on clean clothes, or a bright smile. This is not enough. Did not Jesus say, 'No man comes to the Father, but by Me'?"36

Clearly these stories n\ot only taught about foreign lands and revealed the effectiveness "from the practical preaching angle, of a surgeon's knife," but they also instructed their readers in moral principles and spiritual truths.37

A variation on biography-autobiography related the life stories of missionary heroes like David Livingstone (1813-73; Africa; see Figure 4), Peter Parker (China), or Ida Scudder (1870-1959; India).38 Lucy W. Peabody in David and Susi, for example, linked the heroism and cross-racial benevolence of the adult Livingstone with his early character development and childhood aspirations to become a missionary doctor. According to Peabody, when the young Livingstone "heard a doctor who had been in China tell about the sick children there who had no doctors Davie decided he would go to China and be a missionary. He knew he must study hard. He loved to play but he never forgot his plan. Davie was a good boy and good boys grow into good men."39

FIG. 4. Dr. David Livingstone.

While primarily Anglo male physicians and female nurses or assistants populated the pantheons, there were exceptions. The "Our Girls" and "Our Circle Girls" sections of Missionary Tidings (Christian Woman's Board of Missions) often featured profiles of female medical missionaries that not only described their current work in the mission fields but also outlined their spiritual and educational preparation as children and youth.40 Writing to children in "Over the Teacups," Mrs. D. C. Brown noted that the "names of Olivia Baldwin, Annie Agnes Lackey, Ella Maddock, Dr. Mary Longdon [1869-1947; India], Dr. Jenny Crozier [1875-1959; India] and Zonetta Vance have become as familiar to us as our own." Such "women physicians, confronted with terrible diseases, operations that here the strongest men might shrink from-so little to work with, compared with our magnificent operating rooms and clinical wards. But they do it!" A "never-ending stream of suffer[er]s pass before" their eyes, but exhausted they continue working because "they know that with returning strength and gratitude comes the desire for spiritual healing, and thus the poor have the Gospel preached to them. Isn't it thrilling to think of it? Never say that the day of heroes is past."41

In ethnography-cultural geography the author assumed the stance of an objective observer who took her readers on a bird's-eye tour of an exotic land. For example, consider the following visit to "Miss Rose M. Kinney Girls' School at Ruk":

DEAR CHILDREN: You have all heard of the Pacific islands, and that some of them are high and very beau'ti-ful, and some are low, hardly above the level of the sea. But all the larger ones are inhab'it-ed by a people who have a dark skin, black hair and eyes. They live in little huts that are covered with leaves and have no windows, with the ground for a floor. These children live on breadfruit, co'co-nuts, and fish.42

One advantage of such an approach was that a lot of terrain could be covered, but it may have come at the cost of a depersonalized listener response. Rarely did the narrative include the details of personal encounter that allowed for the kind of reader identification available in biography. In these stories, the medical missionary almost always assumed the role of an explorer or sojourner, not an active participant in the people's lives or lands. And although the authors almost always noted the natural beauty of the countryside and the energetic bustle of city life, the inhabitants and their habits appeared strange, primitive, and a bit foreboding.

FIG. 5. Missionary doctor treating natives.

The travelogue combined elements of both narrative types. In The Congo Picture Book and With the Wild Men of Borneo, typical of this style, the authors took their readers on a trip from home base to mission front.43 The reader rode a steamer to the foreign land, disembarked, and then toured the country on the way to the assigned mission post. Then followed encounters with the native population that entailed healing, teaching, and preaching, but the authors gave detailed personal accounts of the persons involved in the encounters, thereby reducing the abstraction so often present in the ethnographic form (see Figure 5).

Although the medical missionary as active participant rather than simply explorer, adventurer, or sojourner often seemed to allow a more friendly view of native customs, nonetheless, the unconverted natives usually tended to appear exotic, strange, evil, ignorant, and helpless no matter which literary approach the author adopted. Authors often totalized the other's worldview and behavior as evil, while sympathizing with their supposedly universalized experiences with pain, sickness, and sin, and their need for physical and spiritual healing. And not surprisingly, given the interweaving of physical and spiritual health in most cultures, medical missionaries, eager to evaluate, judge, or even deride both indigenous religion and healthcare, often combined a caricature of both into their narratives.44

With no effort to contextualize, a missionary account of "A Heathen Festival in India" described "a large ant-hill which in some way has become an object of worship. A temple has been built over it, and the word has gone abroad that dis-eas'es are cured there. So thousands of people visit the place." Near the temple, men and women repeatedly prostrated themselves on the ground and ritually pierced their children. The children had "a little flesh pinched up on their sides, wires put through the flesh, and, thus pierced, the children are carried in front of the idol, round the temple, and along the road to the other temple."45 "All this," she continued, "is being done to fulfil vows, or to obtain an answer to some prayer, or to get rid of sins, or to get help in some disease or sickness. And we, by your aid, are trying to lead them to the true Saviour; trying by our medical missions to give them health; and, above all, telling them of the love of the Father, and the true sal-va'tion from sin. Along the way our preachers were preaching, and amongst these people our Bible women are working."46 Similarly, in "Pains and Pills, and a Cure that Kills!" Applegarth told her readers that if they were sick, a Chinese doctor "wouldn't do you a bit of good, because he would be a perfect old 'Ignoramus!'," the Indians would "beat on drums to scare the spirits away," and in Africa the "Witch Doctor prances madly around, foaming at the mouth."47

The caption that accompanied the photograph in Figure 6 further illustrates this tendency to deride rather than understand unfamiliar beliefs and practices:

Every once in a while people rub the God-of-Healing so often in a certain spot that they actually wear away his nose or his jaws or his ears: for all the Boys-With-Mumps rub his jaws, then their own jaws, and all the deaf grannies rub his ears, then their own ears. This old lady, for instance, evidently has headaches, for you will notice how she rubs her brow, but a moment ago she undoubtedly rubbed the idol's forehead.

Do you see the pathetic little offerings from sick patients-at least two aprons round his neck? A necklace in one hand and a bag in the other? But, alas! alas! you and I cannot help but know that this unsanitary rubbing is an astonishingly easy way to spread disease and infection instead of curing it.48

FIG. 6. Japanese woman seeking health.

Only as natives slowly learned more about the white man's ways did they "grow up" from their childlike selves, and missionary stories formulized the transformation. Some sort of medical treatment usually initiated the contact between native and missionary medicine. Then, trained to read and understand the written word, the natives studied the Bible, and, prompted by the missionaries and previously converted natives, they learned about God, his only son Jesus, and their enemy the devil. With this new cosmic vocabulary the converts could rename the good spirits (God and his angels) and evil spirits (the devil and his angels) of their former worldview and grow to understand the one, true, Christian God and the power of the devil that stood behind animism and many of their native customs. The medical missionaries then linked a Christian understanding of spirituality with Western customs regarding the prevention and cure of disease. The really bright, promising men and women then received practical training to assist the medical missionary and his staff in the operations of hospital, dispensary, and clinic. Females primarily became nurses, and males usually served as medical assistants and dispensers49 (see Figures 1, 3, and 7).

FIG. 7. Native nurses at Paul White's mission hospital.

The sketch (Figure 8) that accompanied Applegarth's "Story of Two Hands" effectively summarizes the authors' striking contrast between Western-Christian and non-Western-heathen ways of life.50

Ironically, however, the stories occasionally revealed that it was not always clear to the natives who served the devil. Observing a Chinese child with an unmistakably "large lump on her neck," a missionary woman asked the girl's mother to "'Allow me to show you the way to the heal-sick house'" for the '"doctor is there this moment. She will cure your child.'" But the mother "sprang to her feet with startled eyes" and retorted, "'Who is sick? You only are sick. Get away! Get away! We here have no troubles.'" A passerby explained to the confused Westerner that the mother feared that her words would "attract the attention of evil spirits to her child, and so she thinks they will gather around it and cause it to die. She loves her child. She called you the sick one, hoping the evil spirits may be deceived, and follow away after you."51

FIG. 8. The Story of the Two Hands.

The preoccupation of the medical missionaries with Western modernity's concerns about "hygiene, efficiency, and progress effortlessly infiltrated" these stories as t\hey did contemporary travel narratives.52 When a new girl arrived at the Girls' School at Ruk,

they all gather around her and give her a welcome. These girls come to us with only a bit of cloth around the waist and perhaps another bit of cloth over their shoulders. One of the large girls will take the new one to the bath-tub and give her a bath, and then cut her hair, and we give her a new dress; then she is ready to take her place among the other girls. She is very shy at first, but the whole school set themselves to be her teacher, and one says, "We do this"; and an-oth'er says, "The teachers do not like to have us to do that"; so little by little she learns the new ways and begins the new life.53

And although "the Tibetans are kind, truthful, and honest, they are very ugly and dirty, and although they have so much snow and rushing rivers of clear, cold water, they seldom ever wash their bodies, not even their faces and hands, and never wash their clothes."54 Any native resistance to such habits of cleanliness seemed strange to the narrators, since the missionaries "knew it was just plain, everyday Common-sense, the kind your mother and my mother had, because they lived in a Christian land."55

Clearly, a kind of racism underlies much of what I have been describing. Authors often depicted the so-called darker races as inferior, benighted, and degraded; they were not just dirty, they were stupid.56 In 1917 Applegarth described the reaction of African children to the appearance of the missionary in the following terms: "She was the most astonishing person they had ever seen, for her skin was white like the clouds, and everybody else they knew had skin as black as coal! She had eyes as blue as the sky, and everybody else they knew had eyes as brown as the mud in the village streets. So it was no wonder they tagged around after her everywhere she went, exactly like "Mary had a little lamb"-you know?"'7 What strikes one in this passage is not the contrast between skin pigment of European and African, but the similes of comparison. The European is white and blue, like the sky above; the African is black and brown, like the earth beneath. But not just earth; rather, coal and mud. Doubtless the comparisons registered only superficially with children; nonetheless, the almost subliminal allusions to heaven and hell evoked by the upward and downward similes jolt today's adult reader.

But the sensibilities of many if not most authors to such implicitly racist language changed with the times. For example, Applegarth's 1920 edition of Lamplighters Across the Sea, a collection of stories about the heroics of Bible translators, contained references to "petrified Chinamen,""The blackest little girl you ever saw," and "The wise(?) village witch-doctor," but these became "The terrified Chinese,""A little girl with dark brown skin," and "The village witch doctor" in the reissued 1947 edition.

Some authors even recognized faults with their own "white" race and noted the natives' good qualities, and they acknowledged the fact that missionaries, sometimes at least, brought corruption and illness as well as reforms and cures. W. E. Walston told "about the Kaffirs [of South Africa], who are gen'er-al-ly upright and honest before they learn the ways of the white men and Malays. Their as-so- ci-a'tion with Malays and other races has de-grad'ed them."58 Describing the inhabitants of the Cook Islands, Adelaide D. Wellman asserted that

In many respects these people are better off now than they were before any white people came among them. They do not fight so much, and are not in so much danger from one an-oth'er. They have better food, and those who are willing to work have learned to build for themselves better houses. Still, in some ways, they are not so well off as before. They have learned from white people a few bad habits. One of these injures their health and also spoils their teeth. They all used to have fine teeth. Can you think what the habit is that injures both health and teeth?59

And although the natives usually lacked a proper understanding of proper diet, hygiene, or disease, the stories made it clear that they loved their children, although Indians and Chinese preferred boys to girls. Paul White, noteworthy for his sensitivity to native ways, observed that he had "always been struck with the way in which the Africans can handle a child. They have the knack of picking up and comforting a child, and, no matter how fearsome their aspect, never seem to inspire fear in children."60 And White's evenhandedness even extended to his evaluation of witch doctors, much of whose "work is sheer fraud, but over and over they produce cures because they produce a tangible cause for the trouble."61

III. PROGRAMMATIC AND AUTHORIAL INTENTIONS: NARRATIVE CONTEXTS, PURPOSES, AND STYLES

Much of the impact of a good mission story lies in the context of the telling. An individual reader brings his/her own knowledge and experience to the reading, and the author/editor presents a context for the printed text, including an intended audience, a religious milieu, photographs or sketches, and a relationship to Bible study lessons. And when shared orally in the intimacy of one's immediate family, a story's impact is mediated through the unique contexts of family history and experience. More could be said about the dynamics of each of these more private readings, but it is to the organizational and programmatic public contexts for medical missionary stories that I now turn. Sunday school and missionary association leaders not only repeated medical mission stories; they created an instructional culture of missions for their children and youth.

Missionary Tidings (Disciples of Christ), published by the Christian Woman's Board of Missions (est. 1874), argued that "The study of the lives of missionary heroes and heroines, and the association with the unselfish people who are carrying on this Christ-like work, will help the child to form higher and better and more unselfish ideals of life.'2 In the Board's "plan to disseminate missionary intelligence and create missionary zeal, naturally the children and young people were thought of as most hopeful soil in which to sow the seed for future harvesting," and so they organized mission bands and mission circles for the dissemination of mission stories, the creation of missionary activities, and the never ignored necessity of raising missionary donations.63 As a missionary program exercise for juniors related,

"I am the hospital dime. I send out missionary doctors and nurses and build hospitals and buy medicines. Wherever I go to work the people come flocking with the sick folks-the lame, the blind, and the crippled-just as they used to when Jesus was on earth.. . . They need more hospitals, and more doctors and nurses. If I had all of the other nine dimes in the missionary dollar I could use them every one in my work."64

Around 1877 under the auspices of the Christian Woman's Board, these Disciples of Christ women established Mission Bands or Mission Circles to stimulate the missionary spirit among young women and to raise financial support for foreign missions.65 Typical of both denominational and nondenominational organizations, their meetings centered on stories and participatory activities intended to make the needs in mission lands come alive.66 For example, the program guide for February 1910 focused on "Help and Healing in India- Sketches of Our Hospital Work." After songs, Scripture reading, prayer, and club business, the leaders were to "Appoint girls to represent our physicians. Let each girl introduce herself by displaying the picture of the medical missionary she represents, also any other pictures that have to do with her work. By referring to the annual report in the November MISSIONARY TIDINGS and other numbers of the TIDINGS the girls will find material for a brief talk on their work." The closing prayer should remind the girls that "One of the greatest needs of the Christian Woman's Board of Missions is for the medical missionaries. Have a circle of prayer that some of the Circle girls may respond to this need."67

But what about the intended meanings of the authors? Why did they tell the stories, and what can we learn from an analysis of their content? Margaret T. Applegarth (1886-1976), author of dozens of widely distributed missionary stories and plays published under the auspices of denominational (including Baptist and Reformed Church in America), interdenominational (the Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions),68 and nondenominational presses, stated that she wrote her stories "not only to tell facts, but to create an attitude of mind towards missionary work around the world, which shall be unconsciously retained long after the details of the stories themselves are forgotten [and] so that we may raise a new generation with whom God's Kingdom shall be one vast enterprise, instead of two!"69 Clearly she hoped that children would come to see the world as populated by one people-God's children-and that children would be influenced to help those in moral and spiritual darkness find a better way. But she did not completely ignore denominational priorities. She encouraged children to plan each week for the Sabbath mission offering that would enable missionaries to continue their work in "our Hospital,""our missionary school," and "our orphanage." And she undoubtedly shared the sentiments of those in Adventist publications who stated that often "the little folks who read this paper from week to week, have said that when they are grown, they will be foreign mis'sion-a-ries. Perhaps some of you are even thinking about the country you wish to go to. This is very good."70 Just like the little Hebrew girl who helped Naaman, you too can be a "foreign mis'sion-a-ry, and a doctor, and a preacher" who helps people to learn to "worship the true God.\"71

After World War I many Americans came to believe that suspicions and misunderstandings of other peoples and their cultures had led to the devastation of the war. Due to the resultant internationalism and the influential missionary experiences of individuals like E. Stanley Jones and Daniel Fleming, missions in many Protestant churches shifted from an attitude of cultural superiority and judgment to an attitude of cultural sensitivity, openness, and friendship. 2 The International Council of Religious Education, representative of a broad range of Protestant denominations and nondenominational religious organizations, vigorously advocated this new mission emphasis. World friendship, according to Elizabeth Harris, secretary for elementary work at the Missionary Education Movement, meant "an emphasis upon the contributions of other peoples instead of the cultivation of a 'smug' satisfaction with ourselves."73 Ralph E. Diffendorfer, corresponding secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, echoed Harris's sentiments; there had occurred "an awakening of races and peoples to a realization of their own worth," but he believed that the awakening, at least in Asia, was "very largely from the broadcasting ... of the principles of Jesus Christ."74 Clearly, world friendship did not include an embrace of cultural relativism; Christians had some things to offer to improve the beliefs and behaviors of the non-Westerner. And at the top of the list were Jesus, medicine, and Western health practices.

Mission stories and program plans seemed to reflect this prescriptive shift supported by mission advocates. For example, Emma T. Anderson's A'Chu and Other Stories "introduces the reader to the millions of China, the most populous, the most promising of all the mission fields of the world today." According to the publishers, "instead of abstract descriptions of manners and customs," Anderson has, "by a series of true stories, introduced the reader to the real home life of the common people" and is "made to feel the vital power of a life changed by the religion of Jesus Christ.""If these stories shall serve to broaden the vision of those who read them; if they shall stir hearts to lay their best upon the altar of service, as the author of this little book has done; if the missionary spirit shall be strengthened in behalf of this great people, the hope entertained by author and publisher will have been realized."75

IV. CRITICALLY RECONSTRUCTING THE INFLUENCE OF MEDICAL MISSION STORIES

Clearly a variety of factors influenced American men and women to sail across the seas, enter unfamiliar and often hostile lands, and bring the gospel of salvation and the healing hand of Western medicine to native peoples. Some, like Ida Scudder, experienced firsthand as young people the need for female physicians in India where the people refused Western medical care rather than submit their women to examination by a male physician.76 But what can be said about the impact of medical missionary stories on the career choices of their young audiences? Aside from the occasional adult reminiscence, diary entry, or correspondence reference by adult missionaries, few records exist from which one might directly recover the impact of medical missionary stories on Protestant American children. But the evidence that does exist strongly suggests that the stories had a positive impact on later decisions to serve as medical missionaries. Margaret White Eggleston, author of many children's stories for religious education, was not alone in firmly believing that "Many missionaries are on the field to-day as the result of a story of the life, work, or needs of some hero, or heroine, of the past."77

Thomas W. Ayers, a pioneer of Southern Baptist medical missions, resisted God's call to mission service for years, knew nothing of medical missions at the time he went to medical school, and only embarked for service to China in 1901 after his forty-first birthday when a sequence of events he could only interpret as God's insistence compelled his obedience. As a young man Ayers believed that "under the preaching of Dr. Charles A. Stakely, I had a very definite call from God to give myself as a foreign missionary" and only later came to believe that God "led me to study medicine in order to make of me a medical missionary." But as Ayers made clear to potential medical missionaries, both young and old, "the call of a need and the call of the crowd are both inspiring," but "the man or woman who goes to a non-Christian land as a medical missionary without the call of God will not be happy in the hardships incident to such a life, and the probability is that he or she will not remain." Clearly Stakely's stories of need had been important, but an inner conviction of God's call proved crucial.78

Mission stories reached their audiences through a variety of means with often unpredictable results. In the early 190Os the Youth's Companion reported that

A number of years ago the heart of a young girl was greatly moved by a letter from a missionary in India, describing the suffering which was caused by the absolute lack of all knowledge of the right way to treat the sick.

To this young girl this feature of a missionary's work in India seemed at the same time the most trying and the most appealing.

The first response which she desired to make to this appeal was to go to India as a missionary herself. But when she began to prepare herself for that work, it was only to give it up almost immediately, because her health was evidently too weak to endure the strain of a missionary's life.

Nevertheless, she was not disheartened. She began at once to work for the accomplishment of an object which would seem to many but little better than an impossible dream. If she could not go to India herself, she would lay by her earnings for the founding of a modern, well-equipped hospital in the very midst of that country of ignorance, disease and suffering.79

Thwarted from her path to become a medical missionary, this young girl channeled her energies into fund raising, and although she died before she could witness the realization of her goal, her parents and others saw the task to completion.

Gordon S. Seagrave (1897-1965), son of a long line of Baptist missionaries to the Karen of Lower Burma, sat at age five on the veranda of his home in Rangoon. As he listened to the "stories of wild jungles and great deeds" recounted by Robert Harper, an Irish medical missionary to northern Burma, his heart filled with childish enthusiasm for the romance of medical mission, and he announced to his mother that "When I grow up I'm going to be a medical missionary in the Shan States" of northern Burma.80 Little did she know that her son would become the famed "Burma Surgeon" who for "20 years, as a young Baptist medical missionary . . . fought disease and filth, built a hospital, [and] taught native girls to be skilled nurses."81

Henry W. Frost, author of the forward to China Chats: Talks with Children About Things of China, reported that on the basis of his personal experience "persons have received their first and deepest impressions in respect to foreign service in their early youth, indeed, in their childhood.""[Tjhese bright and winsome tales, under the influence of the Spirit," he continued, "will undoubtedly perform a large work of grace and power, and, will lead many children to follow on to know the Lord, until as young men and women they are ready to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth."82

Whether by sermon, letter, oral presentation, or published story, medical mission stories drew American young people to healthcare careers and foreign mission service, but their influence apparently declined as the century advanced. A 1968 global survey of medical missionaries conducted by the Medical Assistance Program documented the fact that missionary speakers and books on missions had a significant impact on influencing them to become medical missionaries. However, over time both of these influences had had a steadily diminishing impact. For example, those with thirteen to sixteen years of missionary service identified their most important influences as the missionary speaker (21.1 percent), parents (21.1 percent), books on missions (10.5 percent), and personal contact (5.3 percent). In contrast, those with four or fewer years of service ranked their most important influences as personal contact (26.9 percent), parents (19.2 percent), and the missionary speaker (15.4 percent) with books on missions just 5.8 percent. Undoubtedly, one's personal contact with a medical missionary always included the telling of some medical missionary experiences. Therefore, it is somewhat uncertain how to interpret this data. Possibly both the opportunity for personal contact with medical missionaries had increased, and the persuasiveness of the impersonal story teller had declined. In either case it seems justified to conclude that missionary stories still carried some clout in the decision to become a medical missionary well into the late twentieth century.83

The transformations inside a child's mind upon hearing medical mission stories will forever remain somewhat mysterious. However, as these reimaginings and reconstructions suggest, medical missionary stories not only motivated some to become medical missionaries, they also possessed a great potential to form within Protestant American children powerful mythic images of both the mission lands and the home front and to lead them to try to perpetuate their culture by remaking the world in Western Christian ways. Those who listened more closely to the stories, however, may have heard their mixed messages regarding healing, superstition, race, and gender, and as a result they may have been in a better position to acknowledge the contradictions and difficulties inherent in simply trying to remake the world i\n one's own image. Medical mission stories possessed, like Malek Alloula's postcards of colonial Algerian harems, "a seductive appeal to the spirit of adventure and pioneering," but "their pseudoknowledge" often presented a "comic strip of colonial morality."84

1. Thanks to Fritz Guy, Ron Numbers, Dana Robert, Robert A. Schneider, and the anonymous reviewers at Church History for helpful comments. Thanks to Linn Tonstad and Joel McFadden for research assistance. Thanks to the libraries and librarians at La Sierra University, Fuller Theological Seminary (esp. William Kostlevy), Azusa Pacific University, Biola University, Claremont School of Theology, and Loma Linda University. Finally, I completed this paper while on the faculty at La Sierra University; thanks to that university and its administration for their support.

2. The editors of Our Little Friend divided new or difficult words into syllables and placed accent marks to assist the young readers in pronunciation.

3. "How a Little Sick Boy was Cured," Our Little Friend 10:27 (December 29, 1899): 214.

4. James H. Roberts, "Child-Life in China," Our Little Friend 8:34 (February 18, 1898): 269 [from the Mission Dayspring].

5. Herb Swanson, "Said's Orientalism and the Study of Christian Missions," International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28 (July 2004): 109.

6. Emily Williston, "Missionary A-B-C'S," in Anita B. Ferris, Missionary Program Material for Use unth Boys and Girls (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1916), 92-93.

7. For an excellent overview of these developments, see Dana L. Robert, "From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II," International Bulletin of Missionary Research 18 (October 1994): 146-60.

8. For example, see the outstanding William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). see also Paul William Harris, Nothing But Christ: Rufus Andersen and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk, d., Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 18801980 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1990); Torben Christensen and William R. Hutchison, d., Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era: 1880- 1920 (Arhus, Denmark: Aros, 1982); and R. Pierce Beaver, "Missionary Motivation Through Three Centuries," in Reinterpretation in American Church History, ed. Jerald C. Brauer, Essays in Divinity 5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). On the role of missionaries in the early development of anthropology, see C. L. Higham, "Saviors and Scientists: North American Protestant Missionaries and the Development of Anthropology/' Pacific Historical Review 72 (2003): 531-59.

9. For a classic exploration of the relationship between missionaries and imperialism, see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "The Missionary Enterprise and Theories of Imperialism," in The Missionary Enterprise in China and America, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 336-73, 419-24. see also Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

10. See Dana L. Robert, "Shifting Southward: Global Christianity Since 1945," International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24 (April 2000): 50-58; Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996); and Lamin Sanneh, "Mission and the Modern Imperative- Retrospect and Prospect: Charting a Course," in Carpenter and Shenk, Earthen Vessels, 301-16.

11. In a recent article Herb Swanson helpfully points out the ways in which a judicious application of the categories of analysis in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) might contribute to the study of Christian missions. According to Swanson, the "relationship of knowledge and discourse to power," the tendency "to see the worst in the East and the best in the West," a "textual attitude" that leads to the belief that humans can best be understood on the basis of what books say, and the "intimate estrangement" of a simultaneous cultural immersion and isolation all hold promise for missiology. see Herb Swanson, "Said's Orientalism and the Study of Christian Missions, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28 OuIy 2004): 107-12.

12. On medical missions, see Christoffer Grundmann, "Proclaiming the Gospel by Healing the Sick? Historical and Theological Annotations on Medical Mission," International Bulletin of Missionary Research 14 (July 1990): 120-26.

13. Quotation from C. Peter Williams, "Healing and Evangelism: The Place of Medicine in Later Victorian Protestant Missionary Thinking," in The Church and Healing, ed. W. J. Shells for the Ecclesiastical History Society, Studies in Church History 19 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 285. On Peter Parker, see Edward V. Gulick, Peter Parker and the Opening of China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). Daniel Wise briefly mentions Dr. Clara A. Swain, pioneer Methodist medical missionary, in Our Missionary Heroes and Heroines: or, Heroic Deeds Done in Methodist Missionary Fields (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1884), 242. For more on Swain and her experiences in India, see Helen Barrett Montgomery, Western Women in Eastern Lands: An Outline Study of Fifty Years of Woman's Work in Foreign Missions (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 187- 96; and Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996), 162-65.

14. James S. Dennis, Christian Missions and Social Progress, 3 vols. (New York: Rveil, 1897-1906), 2:402, 40, η. 2.

15. Ibid., 2:400. For Dennis's complete summary of the positive impact missionaries had on medicine, public health, and hygiene in mission lands, see 2:400-468.

16. Margaret T. Applegarth, Missionary Stories for Little Folks, second Series: Junior (New Yo

Source: Church History

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