4. Medicinal Infrastructures and Medical Missionaries

2021 ◽  
pp. 105-132
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 0308275X2110216
Author(s):  
James Wintrup

This article offers a critique of Christian humanitarianism in Zambia. But it does so by engaging with the arguments of anthropologists who have begun to question the status of political critique within the discipline. These anthropologists argue that critique often undermines ethnographic understanding because it problematically positions the anthropologist as an actor who is able to ‘uncover’ political realities that remain invisible to others. In this article, I take these concerns seriously and attempt to reconsider the practice of critique by drawing on an ethnographic description of the work of Christian medical missionaries in Zambia. Focusing on how these missionaries encouraged one another to ‘see’ their Zambian patients as ‘Christ-like’ and ‘faithful’ in moments of suffering, I argue that these practices of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’ resemble certain forms of political critique. Rather than an exercise in ‘uncovering’ hidden realities, critique can also be understood as an act of ‘aspect-showing’ – the aim of which is to encourage others to ‘see’ the same things in a different light. The critique of Christian humanitarianism I offer here is therefore itself an act of aspect-showing that partially resembles that which missionaries themselves engaged in.


BMJ ◽  
1915 ◽  
Vol 2 (2853) ◽  
pp. 387-387
Keyword(s):  

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Margo S. Gewurtz

Kala-azar is a parasitic disease that was endemic in India, parts of Africa and China. During the first half of the twentieth century, developing means of treatment and identification of the host and transmission vectors for this deadly disease would be the subject of transnational research and controversy. In the formative period for this research, two Canadian Medical missionaries, Drs. Jean Dow and Ernest Struthers, pioneered work on Kala-azar in the North Henan Mission. The great international prestige of the London School of Tropical Medicine and the Indian Medical Service would stand against recognition of the clinical discoveries of missionary doctors in remote North Henan. It was only after Struthers forged personal relations with Dr. Lionel. E. Napier and his colleagues at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine that there was a meeting of minds to promote the hypothesis that the sand fly was the transmission vector.


1973 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
K J McCracken

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 121-140
Author(s):  
Jiayu GONG

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, China was the main area of western medical missions. Medical missionaries, one of the largest cross-cultural groups, left a wealth of records in a foreign land. In this article the author explored how the housing, environment, drink and diets habits of British medical missionaries in China spread the western medical knowledge, and how the medical missionaries constantly recognized, interpreted and improved the health concept toward Chinese in their daily life. The intercultural communication of medical knowledge between China and the West enriched the western public health theory on the one hand, and promoted the establishment of modern public health system in China on the other hand.


BMJ ◽  
1894 ◽  
Vol 1 (1726) ◽  
pp. 219-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. Routh
Keyword(s):  

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