Healing and Evangelism: The Place of Medicine in Later Victorian Protestant Missionary Thinking

Abstract

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical change in the attitude of missionary societies to medicine as an aid to evangelism. For the first fifty or sixty years of the century the talents of the medical doctor were seldom sought and, when they were, it was most often to provide protection for missionaries in areas of particular health hazard. In 1852 it was calculated that there were only thirteen European medical missionaries, and in the period 1851-70 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) recruited seven doctors out of a total of three hundred and seven new missionaries. Suitably qualified applicants were not encouraged. In 1842 the CMS informed a surgeon of their willingness to employ him as a catechist on the clear understanding that medicine ‘was only to be an occasional occupation’. James Henderson, an Edinburgh trained doctor, could find no openings as a medical missionary in 1858. In 1861 Henry Venn, the CMS secretary, told an applicant, who was contemplating medical training, that it was inadvisable to devote time to medicine or surgery because when a candidate ‘attempts to qualify himself by medical studies, it very seldom answers any good purpose’. As late as 1875, J. K. Mackenzie, MRCS (London) and LRCP (Edinburgh), applied to the London Missionary Society (LMS) and ‘was treated altogether ... as if I had come up to ask for a special favour, or a situation, at their hands’.