When the Physician Becomes an Apostle

Missionary medicine, especially healthcare offered by Catholic missions, is a rather neglected field in the study of colonial medicine. In addition, the potential of analytical tools such as the circulation of knowledge or attention for professional identities has not been fully explored yet. In this study of physicians in the Belgian Congo, we argue that a new professional identity – or persona – of the Catholic colonial doctor arose as a result of Catholic religious doctrine, missionary politics and biomedical developments. The persona of the mission’s main healthcare provider, with a strong commitment to curative medicine, was a metropolitan professional identity shaped by older missionary narratives. In colonial day-to-day reality, however, where tensions between physicians, missionaries and state officials abounded, this discursive identity proved difficult to maintain.

Colonial Bio-Politics andMedical Mission inNWFP: A Case ofDr. Pennell of Bannu Medical Mission

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 doctorover the body. This paper delvesinto the myriad of strategies and sites of medical intervention, as hospital, medical camp, home, school, body, culture, race and gender. It takes up in-depth 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.

Transnationalism in Missionary Medicine

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.

Medicine and Colonialism in South Asia since 1500

This article attempts to sketch some of the main themes in historical scholarship, focusing particularly on those issues that have generated the most controversy. It maps the contours of existing scholarship and identified some of the main themes and issues that have animated it. It discusses the historiography of medicine in India that is dominated by the study of epidemics and enables us to draw reliable conclusions about attitudes to state medicine and outbreaks of epidemic disease. It gives an account of medical practice and health care in rural areas, the only real exception being studies of missionary medicine. It also points to important lacunae that remain to be filled. This article may serve to indicate the vast opportunities that await any scholar willing to take up the challenge.

Rethinking Missionaries and Medicine in China: The Miracles of Assunta Pallotta, 1905–2005

This paper uses the cult of Assunta Pallotta, an Italian Catholic nun who died in a north China village in 1905, to critique the existing literature on missionary medicine in China. She was recognized as holy because of the fragrance that accompanied her death, and later the incorrupt state of her body, and her relics were promoted as a source of healing by the Catholic mission hospital, absorbed into local folk medicine, and are still in use today. By focusing on Catholics, not Protestants, and women, not men, the paper suggests similarities between European and Chinese traditional religious and medical cultures and argues that instead of seeing a transfer of European biomedicine to China, we need to think of a single globalized process in which concepts of science and religion, China and the West were framed.

Missionary Medicine and Akan Therapeutics: Illness, Health and Healing in Southern Ghana's Basel Mission, 1828-1918

The Basel missionaries in southern Ghana came from a strong religious healing tradition in southwest Germany that, within some circles, had reservations about the morality and efficacy of biomedicine in the nineteenth century. Along with Akan Christians, these missionaries in Ghana followed local Akan healing practices before the colonial period was formalized, contrary to a pervasive discourse condemning local religion and healing as un-Christian. Around 1885, however, a radical shift in healing practices occurred within the mission and in Germany that corresponded to both the Bacteriological Revolution and the formal colonial period. In 1885 the first medical missionary from Basel arrived in Ghana, while at the same time missionaries began supporting biomedicine exclusively. This posed a great problem for Akan Christians, who began to seek Akan healers covertly. Akan Christians argued with their European coreligionists that Akan healing was a form of culturally relative therapy, not a rival theology.