Search

The archives of global history I The inaccessibility of many traditional, paper archives during the pandemic is a prompt for us to think about archives in the most expansive sense. Non-paper archives were a recurring theme: built environment as archive, landscape as archive (in Tereza Valny's work), inaccessibility as archive. Reading the acknowledgements section of any book that might be categorized as global history, one comes across a long and impressive list of archives, frequently spanning multiple continents. Despite the growing number of publications and seminars seeking to define the field, the "archive of global history" has not been conceptualized or theorized to the same extent as, say, the archive of intellectual history, or the archive of African history. [Extracted from the article]

This essay examines the public views of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) (medical) missionaries in North-western British India of Anglo-Russian rivalry. In their reports, the missionaries recognized the value of their work as worth a "regiment" to the British government. The essay shows that this claim is comparable to views of some of the early nineteenth-century missionaries, who talked about the providential-purpose of the empire, arguing that the extension of the national church was beneficial culturally, religiously, and politically. In contrast to these missionaries, however, the CMS missionaries did not talk about the spread of Christianity per se or the dissemination of the English race or ethical values. Rather, they claimed their work was politically important because it had been instrumental in obtaining people's "trust" and "friendship". They justified this view on at least two grounds: firstly, they claimed they could generate a new archive of knowledge about the region; secondly, they declared they were winning local people for the colonial establishment by changing their feelings. Overall, the essay introduces a point of view from which to tell the story of missionaries and Anglo-Russian rivalry. Moreover, it contributes to emerging studies that have scrutinized the often-ambivalent political effect of "friendship" across axes of colonizer–colonized divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We learn in Chapter two that the first wave of Chinese doctors who immigrated to America in the 1850s were racialized and discredited by regular doctors for being Oriental. They were just as embedded in the American medical marketplace as other practitioners of irregular medicine, Venit-Shelton argues, yet they have been overlooked in historical treatments of unorthodox medicine in America. Herbs and Roots is thus a "corrective", to use Venit-Shelton's term, which chronicles the 200-year history of traditional Chinese doctors and their therapies in America. [Extracted from the article]

The history of hospital construction is primarily divided into pre-Islamic and Islamic periods; the latter also witnessed the emergence of European and American hospitals after the arrival of western medicine in Iran. Kerman Morsalin hospital, belonging to Church Mission Society hospitals, is an example of such hospitals built under the supervision of British doctors in Iran. This hospital, listed as one of the Iranian national heritage, is considered as one of the first contemporary hospitals of this city. But, there was no evidence about its construction date. Therefore, I used the Interpretive-Historical methodology by organizing and analyzing historical documents to discern the early history of this hospital. The aim of this research was to find out when the Morsalin hospital was built. Medical activities of the Church Mission Society, with the cooperation of Dr. Griffith, began in 1901. At First, there was not a special place to work and hence, he started treating patients at home. However, thirteen years later, in 1914, Dr. Dodson started constructing the hospital. This is the hospital which nowadays is known as Morsalin hospital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]