“A Holy Experiment”: Medical Mission Sisters or how Women Religious within the Catholic Church became Doctors*

Abstract

Drawing on archival sources and adopting a microhistory approach that pays attention to “hidden transcripts,” this article aims to fill a gap in the scholarship on Catholic women and medical missions by analysing the largely overlooked contribution of two women doctors, Agnes McLaren and Anna Dengel, in professionalising the healing ministry of the Catholic Church. In 1925, Dengel founded an international religious congregation, the Society of Catholic Medical Missionaries, with the goal of providing professional health care to women in British India at a time when Church law still forbade Sisters to practise the full scope of medicine. Focusing on the years leading up to the Society's foundation and its early days in India, I highlight the multilayered context of their “holy experiment,” the various hierarchies and discourses within which they operated, and the ways in which as European Catholic women religious they negotiated with the Church patriarchy. Focusing on and advancing a nuanced approach to female religious agency, I demonstrate how their complex marginal positionality vis‐à‐vis both Church hierarchy and British colonial establishment made them paradoxical players whose very terms of subordination gave them possibilities for agency and self‐determination. My analysis of their motivations, ideas, and self‐understanding challenges the standard postcolonial critique of medical missions.