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Research on medical missions has largely focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries paying comparatively little attention to earlier periods. The Roman Catholic Church in particular was seen as a latecomer in medical missionary work because canon law supposedly forbade clergymen to engage too closely with the human body. This article offers a different view of medicine and law in early modern conversion efforts and argues that some Catholic missionaries can be called 'medical missionaries'. Looking at Franciscan friars sent to Ethiopia around 1700, the article analyses the legal negotiations surrounding the use of surgery by Catholic clergymen, healing practices they used during the missions and the relationship between medicine and conversion. It shows that missionaries received systematic medical and surgical training in Rome, that they used the acquired skills during their travels and that medicine was crucial to Catholic strategies of spiritual conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of Christian missionaries in British Assam have focused on their role in promoting Christianity or education, not to mention their contributions to the development and standardization of local languages. There has been a singular lack of studies concerning the immense contributions made by the missionaries in setting up a healthcare infrastructure in the region. This absence has further distorted the debate on whether the missionaries operated as independent agents or as auxiliaries of the state. This paper dwells on the medical work carried out by the missionaries in British Assam and contends that the missionaries fulfilled multiple roles and functions in the province. We argue that the significance of the work of the missionaries is enhanced by the utter neglect of healthcare by the colonial state in the frontier region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs how Arab doctors, medical missionaries, British counterinsurgents, and Palestinian rebels negotiated and contested the legitimate role of medical workers and healthcare in times of colonial conflict. Drawing insight from a medical anthropological literature which challenges the notion of medical neutrality as normative, and setting mandate Palestine alongside other case studies of medicine in times of conflict from the interwar Middle East and North Africa, this article argues that while healthcare and medical authority could be put to work to support the colonial status quo, they could serve other, more radical ends too. To highlight the complexity of the political positioning of medical workers and healthcare, this article focuses on the town of Hebron during the great revolt which rocked the foundations of British rule in Palestine between 1936 and 1939, and relies on a range of colonial and missionary archival sources. The first part of the article uses the case study of an Egyptian medical doctor who took up political office in the town in moments of crisis to show how medical authority could be consciously transmuted into a force to uphold a besieged political order. The second part draws on the diary of a British mission doctor to reconstruct his efforts to assert medical neutrality during the great revolt, and—more strikingly still—how Palestinian insurgents participated actively in this attempt to transplant international legal protections to Hebron. The final part traces the incorporation of healthcare into the strategies of both British counterinsurgents and Palestinian rebels, with the British policy of collective punishment indirectly but appreciably degrading access to healthcare for Palestinians, and Palestinian counterstate ambitions extending to the establishment of insurgent medical services in the hills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining debates on the link between civilization and insanity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States, this essay engages the discourse of civilization to discuss the ways in which insanity among Asian immigrants, in particular Chinese and Japanese, was understood, defined and debated. During the period, insanity was regarded as a disease of civilization, which had been increasing due to the struggles of modern life. While Americans witnessed insanity among the “colored” and Asians, they argued that these groups had lower rates of insanity than white Americans and European immigrants because they belonged to lower positions on the civilization scale. Though not explicitly racialist or even racist, the discourse of civilization ordered the international world and drew a clear color line between white westerners and non-white others. At the same time, American missionaries and medical professionals stationed in China and Japan, who were there to see and learn about insanity in Asia, reaffirmed the existing medical understandings of insanity and offered a knowledge base for American psychiatrists who would encounter the Asian insane at their mental institutions. The alleged rarity of mental troubles for Chinese and Japanese was not considered an asset; the insanity debates confirmed the non-white, non-American status of Asian immigrants, rendering them forever foreign. Moreover, their very distance from western civilization explained why Asians in America seemed to have suffered less from mental disturbances and how they could resist the debilitating effects of civilization and migration.

Sent by the Chinese government on medical missions, Chinese female ob-gyns have served in rural and small-town public hospitals in Algeria and Morocco for more than fifty years. Yet little is known about the medical encounters or how the ob-gyns perceived patients and their health cultures. Drawing on untapped Chinese medical-mission literature, this article shows that the ob-gyns have since the 1980s constructed certain images of North African women as an inferior other, either reckless biological reproducers or incompetent health providers. In their criticisms of reproductive practices and female professionalism, they viewed local health policies and institutions through the prisms of modern obstetrics and Chinese gender rhetoric and ultimately bolstered their professional status at home in China. The article also suggests that while the ob-gyns were not attached to a hard-power colonial state apparatus, they retained considerable situational power over their patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article subscribes to the view that the provision of medical services along with the gospel to Africa was the work of both medical missionaries and African agents. Its central argument is that medical missionaries of the Church of the Nazarene enhanced proselytisation in Swaziland (present-day Eswatini) through the provision of medical care and the training of Swazi nurses who doubled as "nurse-evangelists." The article explores the proselytisation strategies employed by the medical missionaries. These strategies included the use of medical missions as centres of proselytisation, and the training and use of Swazi nurses in proselytisation. The analysis of how nurses trained at Ainsworth Dickson Nurse Training School used their training demonstrates that although these African agents did not receive the heroic praise given to white medical missionaries, they instigated proselytisation especially in rural Swaziland in the period under review. Lastly, the article reveals that the training of Swazi nurses was evangelical and it examines how it affected the nurses' work. Using narratives of lepers from the Mbuluzi Leper Hospital, the article illustrates the correlation between missionary medicine and proselytisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Sino-Western Studies is the property of Sanovan Press, Nordic Forum of Sino-Western Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Medical missionary Samuel Hayward Ford arrived in New Zealand's Bay of Islands in the late 1830s, a few years before the formal colonisation of the country. His letters and medical reports to the Committee of the Church Missionary Society revealed the complicated and malleable nature of medicine in the cross-cultural encounter. Through close study of Ford's writings, this article argues that medicine worked to transform and interweave Māori and missionary worlds in precolonial New Zealand. Experiencing the spread of disease in the Bay of Islands, Ford practised and was influenced by evangelical humanitarianism, and he was also entangled in the politics of empire. More than this, his medicine exposed the missionary objective to transform Māori society, and it showcased not just cultural differences regarding medical knowledge but also the exchange of ideas and treatments between Māori and the missionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the colonial project of social control of the Pashtun body as seen through Foucauldian framework of biopower. This paper initiates debate into colonial health politics of NWFP and explores the biopolitical logic as to how the Pasthun subjectivities as medicalizable objects were constituted within the colonial missionary medicine discourses. It examines the ontological consequences of such constructions. It further aims to explore the co-constitution of colonial agents and the authority of the missionary doctor over the body. This paper delves into the myriad of strategies and sites of medical intervention, as hospital, medical camp, home, school, body, culture, race and gender. It takes up indepth analysis of the works of Dr. Pennell i.e. Mission Hospital Bannu and Life among Wild Tribes. The study proposes that the relations of colonial power with the Pashtun body as embedded in the medical missionary discourse were biopolitical in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article follows the expedition of a team of American and Chinese women who ventured from Soochow Women's Medical College in China to provide aid to Czechoslovakian refugees in Vladivostok, Siberia in 1918. Topics discussed include the complexity of power relations in the missionary enterprise, the changes in the American women's foreign mission movement, and the de facto racial segregation that was not evident to the American women medical missionaries. Also mentioned are the American Red Cross in Siberia, ideologies of race and imperialism in the American foreign missionary movement, and images of non-Western women in need of rescue.

This article focuses on the personal missionary experience of an African American woman physician, Dr Georgia Ester Lee Patton (1864-1900), later known as Georgia Washington. Patton worked in Liberia, a unique setting for missionary activities, being a colony established by former American slaves. The primary resource materials used here are missionary photographic archives, which comprise a distinct category of colonial cultural production. Photography assisted missions in promoting western achievements, disseminating Christianity, and advancing progress, by exposing Africans to western civilization. Such imagery was largely created by European photographers working within the social milieu of missionary organizations. Missionary photographs, therefore, functioned as an official public record of the missionary enterprise; today they are invaluable records of the histories of Christian missions around the globe. Missionary archives exist as both public and private archives. Private archives, as opposed to the images planned for a public audience, were compiled by individual missionaries and intended for private viewings. For this case study I use the private archive Patton compiled after she worked as a medical missionary in Liberia between 1893 and 1895. Patton later returned to Tennessee, where she became the first woman physician in the city of Memphis. This article seeks to determine how Patton’s perception of herself as an African American, as a woman, as a Christian, and as a physician influenced her unusual experience as a medical missionary in late nineteenth-century West Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the missionary presence in Kuwait with an eye to destabilising the narrative and definition of modern medicine. Rather than examining the Arabian Mission’s effect on health in Kuwait, this paper focuses on the complex encounter that led to changes in discourse and practice related to health, but also understandings of the body, cleanliness and motherhood. Women are at the centre of this story, as missionary doctors explicitly focused on treating Kuwaiti women. The Arabian Mission is contextualised as part of the Progressive Era American health movement, and also as part of a worldwide process, enabled by colonialism, through which modern medicine and traditional medicine came into conflict, but also affected each other in unexpected ways. This paper steers away from presenting missionaries as the primary actors in their encounter with locals, an easy trap when relying on missionary documents. The Mission was not the only or the primary agent in the dissemination of modern medicine and modern womanhood in Kuwait; I close by introducing two new actors – public health services and Kuwaiti women’s organisations – both of which contributed to making modern medicine and modern ideals of womanhood hegemonic in Kuwait. By examining the missionary encounter in Kuwait, I show the ways in which modern medicine and traditional medicine were both transformed when they came face to face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Unlike the situation in other African countries where Christian missionaries contributed towards the establishment of colonial rule, in Swaziland, colonisation was not facilitated by Christian missionaries. Instead, it was the establishment of the British colonial presence in Swaziland which facilitated evangelisation especially by the Church of the Nazarene (CON) medical missionaries. Coming to Swaziland in the 1920s - 17 years after the British colonisation of Swaziland - the CON medical missionaries served to heighten the Swazi cultural subjugation by consolidating and legitimising colonial authority through introducing western biomedicine as one of the benefits of civilisation, thus undermining the power and influence of traditional healers, while ensuring British dominance. This paper advances the argument by historians of empire - which states that missionaries were agents of empire - by adding the fact that not all missionaries were involved in initiating colonisation. Instead, in some parts of Africa, colonisation was successfully attained without any missionary assistance. However, medical missionaries became very useful to colonising powers after colonisation, when they fortified and legitimised colonial authority. Furthermore, the paper attempts to demonstrate how the state assisted the CON medical missionaries in evangelisation and how these medical missionaries augmented British colonial authority in Swaziland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Growing concerns about the value and effectiveness of short-term volunteer trips intending to improve health in underserved Global South communities has driven the development of guidelines by multiple organizations and individuals. These are intended to mitigate potential harms and maximize benefits associated with such efforts.Method: This paper analyzes 27 guidelines derived from a scoping review of the literature available in early 2017, describing their authorship, intended audiences, the aspects of short term medical missions (STMMs) they address, and their attention to guideline implementation. It further considers how these guidelines relate to the desires of host communities, as seen in studies of host country staff who work with volunteers.Results: Existing guidelines are almost entirely written by and addressed to educators and practitioners in the Global North. There is broad consensus on key principles for responsible, effective, and ethical programs--need for host partners, proper preparation and supervision of visitors, needs assessment and evaluation, sustainability, and adherence to pertinent legal and ethical standards. Host country staff studies suggest agreement with the main elements of this guideline consensus, but they add the importance of mutual learning and respect for hosts.Conclusions: Guidelines must be informed by research and policy directives from host countries that is now mostly absent. Also, a comprehensive strategy to support adherence to best practice guidelines is needed, given limited regulation and enforcement capacity in host country contexts and strong incentives for involved stakeholders to undertake or host STMMs that do not respect key principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Susan Barbara Tallmon Sargent Collection, one of the numerous digital collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah centered upon the papers of Susan Tallmon Sargent, a physician who served as a medical missionary in China in the early 20th century. The collection includes correspondence relating to her education which culminated in her graduation from Northwestern in Chicago in 1902 and other documents about medical missionaries in China.

Revolutionary Cuba has been a fixture in the international media for decades. Topics that made headlines around the globe have included Fidel Castro's death, US-Cuba relations, visits to Havana by the Pope, Cuba's international medical missions, and economic changes under Raúl Castro. One topic, however, which has been crucial to human development in contemporary Cuba, has received comparatively little media attention - sexual diversity (LGBT) rights. This study examines articles that focus on sexual diversity rights published from among the most popular news outlets of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Two fundamental questions are addressed: what is the international media's perception of sexual diversity rights in Cuba? And what does this suggest about the overall understanding of the Revolution?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work analyses Albert Schweitzer's complex relationship to Africa, and places him within the context of medical missionizing. Although he worked in Africa for over fifty years, Schweitzer was strangely indifferent to the continent's culture. Unlike his fellow missionaries, he never learned native languages, and his service was primarily grounded in a Nietzschean rejection of European conventionalities and a desire to develop his unique ‘ethical personality’. Schweitzer's self-belief enabled him to create a village-hospital where the sick could come with their families for treatment and refuge, and contributed to his idea of the ‘reverence for life’, a secularized ethics of compassion and environmental protection that made him famous in the West. The village-hospital enabled him to tend the sick more effectively, but after the First World War it became more hierarchical and de-personalized. Schweitzer's missionary experiment in Lambaréné was simultaneously radical and conformist, daring and self-protectively conservative. His desire to serve was as profound as any of his clerical colleagues, but it was built, as will be seen, upon rebellious ethical foundations. Schweitzer stands out not so much for his therapeutic innovations (though these were important), as for his later formulation of a neo-Christian ecologism that assured his fame in Europe and America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Asian Journal of Women's Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Medical Missionaries of Mary are an Irish Catholic missionary congregation founded in 1937 by Marie Martin. From the outset the congregation embodied a new sense of optimism that was reflected in its aspirations of modernity and internationalism. This paper explores the development of the Medical Missionaries of Mary as an international missionary network. It argues that whilst in its vision and foundation the congregation projected its work as international and modern, the reality was more complex. The missionaries practised their own distinct brand of maternity medicine that incorporated Irish medical thought, Catholic social teachings, and the demands of the local women. This paper will consider how this unique blend of maternity medicine was projected from Ireland and refashioned within the context of the mission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the historical confrontation between Western obstetrical medicine and indigenous midwifery in nineteenth-century Siam (Thailand). Beginning with the campaign of medical missionaries to reform Siamese obstetrical care, it explores the types of arguments that were employed in the contest between these two forms of expert knowledge. Missionary-physicians used their anatomical knowledge to contest both particular indigenous obstetrical practices and more generalized notions concerning its moral and metaphysical foundations. At the same time, by appealing to the health and well-being of the consorts and children of the Siamese elite, they gained access to the intimate spaces of Siamese political life. The article contends that the medical missionary campaign intersected with imperial desires to make the sequestered spaces of Siamese political life more visible and accessible to Western scrutiny. It therefore reveals the imbrication of contests over obstetrical medicine and trade diplomacy in the imperial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficacies of Western and Chinese medicine have been under debate for a long time, and the whole issue still raises questions for the contemporary world. The article emphasizes the humanistic approach as well as the scientific method of the early Protestant medical missionaries to China, so as to give a more comprehensive scope to understand their historical roles and practices in a cross-cultural context. The authors also wish to call for a global readership to further discuss this historical legacy with regard to the reception of Christianity in contemporary China and other East Asian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: We describe a follow-up program for patients undergoing surgical procedures with documented results from short-term surgical mission trips to the developing world. The surgical procedures were all performed at a government hospital in Pucallpa, Peru, a remote city in the Amazon.Methods: Between July 2007 and January 2012, ten surgical mission trips were completed with a mean time of six days on location and a mean number of 2.3 surgeons (range, two to five surgeons) per trip. A Peruvian general surgeon conducted postoperative visits at time intervals of two to four weeks, five to sixteen weeks, four to seven months, and eight to twelve months. Each visit included the completion of a patient outcome form, radiographs, and functional range-of-motion photographs. Patient demographic characteristics; type of surgical procedure; completed follow-up; complications including infection, malunion, or nonunion; and clinical results were analyzed.Results: Of the 127 patients eligible for analysis, twenty-three patients were lost to follow-up, leaving a follow-up rate of 81.9% (104 of 127 patients). Patients were predominantly male (63.5%) and had a mean age of 37.0 years (range, ten months to 93.4 years). The mean length of follow-up was 11.8 months, with a mean number of 3.7 postoperative encounters. Orthopaedic trauma fixation was the predominant surgical procedure (57%), with forty-two procedures (40%) being open reduction and internal fixation. In the 104 patients, successful wound-healing occurred in 101 (97%) and 100 (96%) had a functional outcome deemed to be good or fair by the in-country physician. The infection rate was 2.9% (three patients), with 97% (fifty-seven of fifty-nine) of fractures united. There was one nerve injury in a pediatric patient treated for supracondylar humeral malunion, and two cases of prominent implant necessitating removal. The mean direct cost of the follow-up program was $20,041 in U.S. dollars per year.Conclusions: It is possible to develop a sustainable surgical patient follow-up program with robust results and to achieve acceptable outcomes for orthopaedic conditions, even in an austere medical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses mennonite medical missions and mentions history of mennonites. Topics discussed include medical doctors, anabaptists and medical personnel. Other topics which includes hygiene, mortality rates and Mennonite Church are also discussed. In addition, topics such as medical care are also mentioned.

The article discusses mennonite mission in India. Topics discussed include evangelism, education and medical care. Other topics which include mennonite Church, mennonite missionaries and mennonite medical mission are also discussed. In addition, topics including Christianity and protestant evangelism are also mentioned.

The authors discuss aspects of medical care during emergencies and war. They mention the negligence on the equity and neutrality of medical mission in modern disputes wherein militant factions are separated through identities such as sect, religion and ethnicity. An overview of an analysis on the risk experienced by medical personnel and establishments during conflict is also presented.

This article examines anti-missionary rumors that prevailed in nineteenth-century China and led to the Tianjin Missionary Case of 1870. Relying on archival sources, it shows that many rumors were fueled by Protestant missionaries’ medical practices in addition to political conflicts. Furthermore, the rumors were framed in spatial concepts. The rumors arose and persisted not because the missionaries deliberately hid information, but rather because the visibility of their daily activities, the accessibility of the space they inhabited and practiced in, and the spatial placement of their living quarters contradicted cultural norms in nineteenth-century China and therefore prevented the Chinese from acquiring correct information about the missionaries. The ambiguity of information that caused the rumors was the result of the confrontation between two ways of understanding space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mission hospitals founded by American Board missionaries in the late Ottoman period set an unusual example within the broader framework of ottoman provincial healthcare services. These hospitals provided free health services to many poor and needy patients irrespective of their ethnic and religious origins: most importantly, they had access to Muslims, unlike typical Catholic and Protestant missionary institutions which were only able to operate among the non-Muslim population of the empire. By these means, mission hospitals managed to gain the sympathy of both the local population and Ottoman local officials. This study will focus on the historiography of mission hospitals and the fundamental debates surrounding these institutions under the rubric of two main headings. First, the study will set out a short historiography of mission hospitals, their typical modus operandi and the audiences they reached out to in technical terms. Then, from a theoretical perspective, the study will shed light on the underlying motivations of these mission hospitals along with Ottoman governmental attitudes toward these institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although China's shift away from traditional medicine in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries took place under the influence of Western medicine, much of it introduced by missionaries, cultural similarities and geographical closeness meant that Japanese medical schools and doctors acted as important intermediaries in the transfer, especially in the establishment of a modern medical terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early years of the introduction of Christianity into China, one American medical missionary distinguished himself by his kindness and generosity towards the Chinese people, and also by his surgical prowess. Peter Parker (1804-1888) was a graduate from the Yale University Medical School and was also an ordained minister. He came to the south China city of Canton (now called Guangzhou) in 1834, built a hospital, treated the patients without charge and also groomed medical apprentices to help him in his work. He so impressed a Chinese artist, Lam Qua (1801-1860) that Lam offered to paint in oil, without charge, some of the unusual patients of Parker. Parker stayed in China until 1857. Altogether, there are about 109 paintings. More than 80 of them are in the Harvey Cushing/ John Hay Whitney Medical Historical Library of the Yale University Medical School, New Haven, and 23 of them are in Guy's Hospital, London. A description of some of the paintings, together with accounts of Parker and Lam are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a personal past of public health scientist John B. Grant. Topics discussed include his early life that includes his family, education and friends, details of his father James Skiffington Grant who was a medical missionary at the Hwa Mei Hospital in Ning-bo, China and also quotes some important correspondence.

Tuberculosis existed in Japan long before the arrival of the first medical missionaries, and it would survive them all. Still, the epidemic during the period from 1890 until the 1920s proved salient because of the questions it answered. This paper analyzes how, through the actions of the government, scientists, foreign evangelical leaders, and the tubercular themselves, a nation defined itself and its obligations to its subjects scientifically, and how foreign evangelical organizations, including the Young Men's Christian Association (the Y.M.C.A.) and The Salvation Army, sought to utilize, as much as to assist, those in their care. With both Japanese government officials and foreign evangelical leaders employing moral entrepreneurism in their approach to the victims of the nation's epidemic, the tubercular became pawns in the relationships between the Meiji and Taishō governments, the Y.M.C.A., The Salvation Army, St. Luke's Hospital, and the Omi Mission. Within this analytical framework, this paper also examines such issues as how Protestantism allowed some of the disease's victims to withstand societal stigma, and how its proponents viewed their obligation to their fellow man; how concepts of public health changed when faced with a disease with no known cure, and how much of the attempts to respond to the disease fell victim to partisan politics and personality disputes; how gender affected national, societal, and religious rights, and how disease affected perceptions of gendered behavior. Finally, this work analyzes how the value of human life was parsed and differentiated medically, particularly vis-à-vis utility to both the Japanese nation and the state of Protestantism in the early 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practice of dual translation (heyi) in the late Qing, focusing in particular on Quanti xinlun, a physiological treatise compiled by Benjamin Hobson (1816-1873) and his Chinese assistants. It argues that, owing to the considerable latitude allowed to Hobson's Chinese partners, the intellectual syncretism of the translation was a direct consequence of the Chinese agency at play in intercultural exchange. The collaborative process in the making of Quanti xinlun is also explored, and two passages in which the "Sinicization" of western physiology is most obvious are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western missionaries began to arrive in China in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, prompting a meeting between Chinese and Western medicine. At first, the Jesuits placed Chinese medicine on an equal footing with Western medicine. Widening social disparities between China and the West, however, later caused Western people's valuation of Chinese medicine to sink. Christian hospitals flourished following the Opium War (1840-1842); and to a certain extent, medical missionaries began to acknowledge the value of traditional Chinese drugs. They used scientific methods to analyze the components of Chinese drugs but widely criticized the principles of Chinese medicine and slighted Chinese medical practitioners. Lacking an effective exchange between Chinese and Western medical circles, Western doctors universally questioned the basic value of Chinese medicine. After the Republic of China was founded, the missionaries' medical cause experienced internal and external changes. The development of medical schools at Christian universities provided the conditions for the missionaries to conduct in-depth research of Chinese medicine, while Western-trained Chinese doctors' introductions of Chinese medicine redressed the missionaries' misinterpretations of the canons of Chinese medicine. In particular, some medical missionaries, who had spent a long time in China and had studied the medical arts in conjunction with Chinese doctors, developed a "sympathetic viewpoint" via these interactions and began to recognize the value of Chinese medical principles, treatment experience, and drugs, setting a precedent for Westerners to understand and utilize the knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article re-examines the question of Albert Schweitzer's career as a medical missionary in the Gabon. After noting that Schweitzer has rarely been the subject of any discussion among Africanists and explaining why that is the case, the article looks at why Schweitzer decided to go to the Gabon, how he perceived his role there, how his attitudes to colonialism evolved, and what role his African experience played in the evolution of his thought. Among other things, the article seeks to bring out tensions and contradictions in Schweitzer's relationship to the African continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American medical missionary movement in the 19th and 20th centuries in South China was one of the important movements to influence the country. This movement had an impact on hygiene modernization in China generally and in Canton particularly. The American doctors in Canton not only criticized the Chinese for lacking modern concepts of bodily cleanliness and fitness, but also participated in campaigns against contagious disease. Both American doctors and the Cantonese government took part in the hygiene and health management of Cantonese residents. This article focuses on how the American medical missionaries encouraged the Cantonese to change their unhygienic habits and to improve the unsanitary environment of Canton, conducted vaccination work, fought the plague, treated opium addicts and lepers, and promoted rural hygiene and health work. This article also studies how the Cantonese elites, encouraged by Americans and impressed by Western preventive medicines and measures to some degree, advocated sanitary modernization, and how the Cantonese medical professionals and the Canton government worked together to launch a public health and hygiene movement in Canton in the 1920s and 1930s. Placing meanings of health and disease at the centre of modern Cantonese consciousness, this article argues that, partially under the American doctors' influence, modern hygiene became an essential element in the formulation of Cantonese modernity. Hygienic modernity not only transformed Canton but also manipulated the Cantonese perception of hygiene requirements for national survival in a modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]