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This study examines medicine and health, colonialism and Christian missionary efforts in Central Africa through the case-study of the Livingstonia Mission of the Free Church of Scotland in Malawi between 1875 and 1930.
Missionary medicine flourished during the period of high European imperialism, from the late-1800s to the 1960s. Although the figure of mission doctor – exemplified by David Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer – exercised a powerful influence on the Western imagination during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, few historians have examined the history of this important aspect of the missionary movement. This collection of articles on Asia and Africa uses the extensive archives that exist on medical missions to both enrich and challenge existing histories of the clinic in colonial territories – whether of the dispensary, the hospital, the maternity home or leprosy asylum. Some o...
In the mid-1800s, a group of High Anglicans formed the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). Inspired by Dr. David Livingstone, they felt a special calling to bring the Church, education, and medical care to rural Africans. To deliver services across a huge, remote area, the UMCA relied on steamer ships that were sent from England and then reassembled on Lake Malawi. By the mid-1920s, the UMCA had built a chain of mission stations that spread across four hundred miles. In The Steamer Parish, Charles M. Good Jr. traces the Mission's history and its lasting impact on public health care in south-central Africa-and shows how steam and medicine, together with theology, allowed the Mission to impose its will, indelibly, on hundreds of thousands of people. What's more, many of the issues he discusses-rural development, the ecological history of disease, and competition between western and traditional medicine-are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago.
Missionaries and their medicine is a lucid and enthralling study of the encounter between Christian missionaries and an Indian tribal community, the Bhils, in the period 1880 to 1964. The study is informed by a deep knowledge of the people amongst whom the missionaries worked, the author having lived for extensive periods in the tribal tracts of western India. He argues that the Bhils were never the passive objects of missionary attention and that they created for themselves their own form of ‘Christian modernity.’ The book provides a major intervention in the history of colonial medicine, as Hardiman argues that missionary medicine had a specific quality of its own – which he describes and analyses in detail – and that in most cases it was preferred to the medicine of colonial states. He also examines the period of transition to Indian independence, which was a highly fraught and uncertain process for the missionaries.