The history of dental hygiene in South Korea

This historical narrative highlights the origin and development of the dental hygiene profession in South Korea. The legacy of early American missionaries to Korea includes profound and long-lasting contributions in medicine, education and theology. Many of Korea's top universities today have their roots in the missionary schools of the late nineteenth century, including Yonsei University, home of the first dental hygiene program in Korea. From Yonsei in Seoul, the dental hygiene profession spread throughout the country, includingtheAmerican missionary-based program in Kwangju in 1977. Contributions included clinical and didactic education, as well as professional leadership and development. American dental missionaries developed the profession of dental hygiene in Korea, and provided guidance to Korean dentists and hygienists for its growth and expansion.

Missions and medicine at Amherst: family ties to Edward Hitchcock jr, the missionary movement, and the American University of Beirut

The Haystack Movement began at Williams College in 1805, occasioning the spread of American missions throughout the world. A half century later, two graduates of nearby Amherst College, Edward Hitchcock Jr and Daniel Bliss, laid the foundations for college health services in this country and for mission work and education in the Middle East. The influences of these two 19th century Amherst alumni are still felt today in our college health services and at the American University of Beirut.

Poor Little Ritz Boy David "does" Hawaii or: lucky Davy salutes lucky Lindy

In this article, David Bittner explodes the myth, restated in Brideshead Revisited (1945), that Polynesians are "happy and harmless." He does so for the same reason that Evelyn Waugh does: "the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist" has changed all that (p. 174). Touring Hawaii in July of '09, Bittner was interested to discover some unusual bits of American heritage, but saddened to see how "civilization" and "Americanization" actually seem to have eroded the Hawaiian people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Bittner's dual religious heritage-Judaism by birth and upbringing and Catholicism by choice in mid-life-has given him the perspective to apply the lessons of Hawaiian history to his own personal issues, particularly forgiveness.

Dengue fever among U.S. travelers returning from the Dominican Republic - Minnesota and Iowa, 2008

In February 2008, a group of U.S. residents became ill with symptoms and clinical findings suggestive of dengue fever after returning from the Dominican Republic, where they had traveled to work as missionaries. Dengue is endemic in the Dominican Republic and most tropical and subtropical areas of the world, including the Caribbean, and represents a known health risk for U.S. residents traveling to or working in those areas. Subsequent investigation by the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH), the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH), and CDC determined that at least 14 (42%) of 33 missionaries traveling to the Dominican Republic met the case definition for dengue fever, and 12 had cases that were confirmed serologically. Of the 13 patients interviewed, all had weakness and fever, with 12 reporting chills and body or joint pain. Ten patients had noticed mosquitoes inside or outside their house in the Dominican Republic, but only three had used repellent. Before departing on their trip, none of the 13 ill travelers interviewed had been aware of dengue in the Dominican Republic, and only two had sought pre-travel medical advice. The Dominican Republic is a frequent destination for U.S. travelers providing missionary and humanitarian services and also for vacationers. These cases indicate a need to increase awareness of dengue prevention measures among U.S. travelers to areas where they might be at risk for dengue.

Did Darwin change his mind about the Fuegians?

Shocked by what he considered to be the savagery he encountered in Tierra del Fuego, Charles Darwin ranked the Fuegians lowest among the human races. An enduring story has it, however, that Darwin was later so impressed by the successes of missionaries there, and by the grandeur they discovered in the native tongue, that he changed his mind. This story has served diverse interests, religious and scientific. But Darwin in fact continued to view the Fuegians as he had from the start, as lowly but improvable. And while his case for their unity with the other human races drew on missionary evidence, that evidence concerned emotional expression, not language.

[Tamil medicine and the perception of pietist missionaries of the Danish-Halle Tranquebar Mission in the 1st half of the 18th century]

The cooperation between medical systems of different cultures is a widely discussed problem. In an historical example, the perception of Tamil medicine by the Pietist missionaries of the Danish-Halle Mission in the first half of the 18th century illustrated the different meaning assigned to diseases and cures as well as differences in medical treatments compared to European medicine. Published for over 60 years starting in 1708, the Halle Reports enable us to understand the changes and developments in the relationship between the European and Tamil cultures that met in Southern India. The entrance of the first-generation Pietist missionaries (until 1720) was clearly silhouetted against a behavior that was directed at suppressing the traditional and asserting the European forms of cultural practice. They developed forms of a partnership-like association which is still discernable in the edited reports. The encounter between the Pietist missionaries and Tamil culture can be characterized as both empirical and critically reflective thanks to excellent language skills and an open-minded perspective.

Remedial agents: missionary physicians and the depopulation of Hawai'i

This article examines the activities and perspectives of nineteenth-century American missionary physicians in the Hawaiian Islands. The physicians' attitudes toward Hawaiian morbidity and depopulation are viewed in relation to the greater missionary community's role in the political transformation of the island nation. The article argues that missionary physicians monitored and reported on Native Hawaiian depopulation (a result of introduced western diseases) while simultaneously advertising the islands' benefits to American consumptives, imperialists, and others. Mission doctors also failed to respond effectively to the greatest epidemiological crisis Hawai'i had ever faced: a venereal scourge with a resulting blight of Native Hawaiian infertility. As a result of these and other factors, American hegemony in Hawai'i by midcentury was a foregone conclusion.

["And thus there was another pointless thing in the country [...]". The failed homoeopathic training of missionaries at the Basle Mission]

This article deals with the unsuccessful attempts to allow missionaries of the Basle Mission to undergo homoeopathic training. Before the Mission undertook systematic medical missionary work in society in the 1880s, there were various requests and suggestions to train the missionaries in homoeopathy. Here, these attempts are put into a greater context of the research into "Homoeopathy and Mission". It becomes clear that Hahnemann's teachings were certainly used in the Mission, even if finding this out is sometimes arduous.

A time for renewal: a lessons-learned review on the role of CISM in caring for missionaries after the Rwandan genocide

In 1994 more than 800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan genocide. Seventh Day Adventist missionaries were forced to evacuate the country under conditions of extraordinary stress and personal threat. Their Church was faced with the necessity of rapidly developing a spectrum of support services to assist the distressed missionaries and their family members in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe. Individual missionaries, and sometimes their entire family units, had witnessed horrific atrocities perpetrated against members of their congregations and the general public. In some situations of their own church members actively participated in the murders. Church leaders combined their efforts with the resources of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation to provide immediate, multifaceted support services to the missionaries and their families. This article briefly describes the breadth and depth of the specific Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) program that was developed and provided to Rwandan Seventh Day Adventist missionaries in April of 1994. The results of a brief post-support evaluation survey are presented.

Searching for success: boys, family aspirations, and opportunities in Gabon, ca. 1900-1940

Boys growing up in rural Gabon between 1900 and 1940 negotiated with many challenges: the rise of migrant labor, famines and hardships brought on by World War I, the growth of Christianity and African-based spiritual traditions, and the undermining of clans, which had been the main form of social and political organization in the nineteenth century. Parents, extended family members, missionaries, and European businesses recruited boys to serve their varied interests. Boys in turn developed new self-understandings by leaving their homes as students, workers, and clients of older men. This article examines the life histories of four boys to trace the successes and challenges that individual boys encountered in this turbulent era. Interestingly, older biological relatives of boys generally succeeded in maintaining their authority over children living far from home, although the education and wages that boys received forced older men to offer boys more benefits.

Child slaves and freemen at the Spiritan Mission in Soyo, 1880-1885

Catholic missionaries in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africa more commonly than Protestants purchased slaves to build their mission stations. This article provides a micro-historical analysis of the redemption of child slaves by the Holy Ghost Fathers in Soyo, West Central Africa, in the years immediately preceding the colonial partition of Africa. It argues that the Spiritan missionaries liberated slaves for instrumental rather than humanitarian reasons. As local freemen were difficult to control, the mission depended for its growth on the import of slave children. Furthermore, since the missionaries operated on the same markets and paid the same prices for slaves as regular buyers, their purchasing practices showed a strong resemblance with ordinary slave trading.

The leprosy asylum in India: 1886-1947

Writing against a historical practice that situates the leprosy asylum exclusively within prison-like institutions, this article seeks to show the variation in leprosy asylums, the contingencies of their evolution, and the complexity of their designs, by devoting attention to the characteristics of the leprosy asylum in India from 1886 to 1947, in particular to the model agricultural colony. Drawing upon the travel narratives of Wellesley Bailey, the founder of the Mission to Lepers in India, for three separate periods in 1886, 1890-91, and 1895-96, it argues that leprosy asylums were formed in response to a complex conjunction of impulses: missionary, medical, and political. At the center of these endeavors was the provision of shelter for persons with leprosy that accorded with principles of good stewardship and took the form of judicious use of donations provided by benefactors. As the Mission to Lepers began to bring about improvements and restructuring to asylums, pleasant surroundings, shady trees, sound accommodation, and good ventilation became desirable conditions that would confer physical and psychological benefits on those living there. At the same time, the architecture of the asylum responded to economic imperatives, in addition to religious and medical aspirations, and asylums moved towards the regeneration of a labor force. Leprosy-affected people were increasingly employed in occupations that contributed to their sustenance and self-sufficiency, symbolically reincorporating the body damaged by leprosy into the economic world of productive relations.

[The establishment and development of Blyth hospital in Wenzhou]

Blyth hospital was the earliest church hospital established by western missionaries in Wenzhou, since then, western medicine had been introduced into Wenzhou. The establishment and development of Blyth hospital greatly accelerated the development of Wenzhou local medical and health work so that the health level of the Wenzhou people improved. The objectives, pattern, experience and characteristics of the establishment of the hospital played a certain revelatory role in modern medical work and medical education.

[Ningbo Renze hospital in modern times]

After the Opium War in 1842, the Western forces came into China in great numbers. In order to give missionary sermons, the Anglican Mission set up Renze hospital in Ningbo in the 1870s. As the expansionist product of western imperialist powers in China, Renze hospital had colonial characteristics, but the missionaries' medical activities played a certain advocational role in the development of the medical health advancement of Ningbo in modern times, as well as a role in the changes in social values and bad habits.

[Albert Schweitzer and psychoanalysis]

The correspondence between Albert Schweitzer and Oskar Pfister, published in 2006, reveals Schweitzer's strong interest in psychoanalysis. That Schweitzer, ethicist, theologian and missionary doctor, would show such appreciation for psychoanalysis to which the Zurich pastor had introduced him is not immediately self-evident. This article indicates three points of congruence which may explain the connectivity between Schweitzer's thinking and psychoanalysis.

Moral transgression, disease and holistic health in the Livingstonia Mission in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Malawi

This article examines ideas of morality and health, and connections between moral transgression and disease in both Scottish missionary and Central African thought in the context of the Livingstonia Mission of the Presbyterian Free Church of Scotland in Malawi during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By concentrating on debates, conflicts and co-operation between missionaries and Africans over the key issues of beer drinking and sexual morality, this article explores the emergence of a new "moral hygiene" among African Christian communities in Northern Malawi.

Treatment of congenital anomalies in a missionary hospital in Bangladesh: results of 17 paediatric surgical missions

BACKGROUND AND AIM OF THE WORK

We report 17 years of experience in a missionary hospital with decreased facilities in Bangladesh. Our interest was directed at children with congenital malformations since they live in a society where the exclusion of abnormal children is common. A better treatment for these children offers them a better future.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Bangladesh is among the most densely populated countries in the world: its population ranges from 142 to 159 million, and it is one of the poorest nations in the world. From 1991 to 2008 our Italian pediatric surgical team performed 17 5 weeks missions in a missionary hospital in Khulna, Bangladesh, during the months of January and February.

RESULTS

A total of 1556 patients underwent surgery, mostly for severe congenital anomalies. The infection rates were very low: 2-3%; the mortality rate was 0.4% for all the operations.

CONCLUSIONS

Good pre-operative preparation and assistance, assurance of cyclical follow-up and a trained surgical team allowed the successful treatment of complex malformations in a missionary hospital with modest services.

[The establishment of SUMC (Severance Union Medical College) Psychiatry Department and the formation of humanistic tradition]

Psychiatry is a branch of medicine which deals with the problem of mental health. Although psychiatric concept and treatment is not absent in traditional medicine in Korea, it was not regarded as an independent discipline of medicine. Modern psychiatry was introduced into Korea as modern Western medicine w as introduced in 19th century. The American medical missionary Dr. Allen and Dr. Heron gave the first classification of mental diseases of Korean patients in their first year report of Jejoongwon hospital. The statistics are characterized by relatively high rate of hysteria patients among the patients with mental disorders. It was Dr. Mclaren who took the charge of the Psychiatric Department of Severance hospital, the successor of Jejoongwon hospital. As a psychiatrist, Dr. Mclaren had a deep interest in human nature and mind. His thinking on the subjects was based on his Christian faith and philosophy. He claimed that Christian faith plays an important role in curing mental diseases. And several medical students decided to become a psychiatrist under his influence. Among them is Dr. Lee Chung Chul who took the charge of the Department of Psychiatry after Mclaren. After graduation in 1927, Dr. Lee studied in Peking Union Medical College, Australia, and Japan. His main research interests were focused on the biological aspects of mental disorders, and he published several important papers on the subject. But his unexpected early resignation and subsequent expulsion of Dr. Mclaren from Korea by Japanese colonial government hindered further development of psychiatry in Severance Union Medical College until the Liberation from Japanese occupation in 1945. But some of their students specialized in psychiatry during the hard period of early 1940s and they played an important role in the development of modem psychiatry in Korea after the Liberation.

[Establishment and activity of PoKuNyoKwan]

PoKuNyoKwan was established in 1887 by Meta Howard, a female doctor who was dispatched from Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, an evangelical branch affiliated with U.S. North Methodist Church. PoKuNyoKwan was equipped with dispensaries, waiting rooms, pharmacies, warehouses, operating rooms, and wards for about 30 patients. It used a traditional Korean house, which was renovated for its medical purpose, in Ewha Haktang. Residing in Chung Dong, the medical institution had taken care of women's mental and physical health for about 25 years, until it was merged with East Gate Lillian Harris Memorial Hospital in 1912, and then its dispensary function was abolished in 1913. Medical missionaries (Meta Howard, Rosetta Sherwood, Mary M. Cutler, Emma Ernsberger, Esther K. Pak, Amanda F. Hillman) and nurse missionaries (Ella Lewis, Margaret J. Edmunds, Alta I. Morrison, Naomi A. Anderson), who were professionally trained in the United States, and their helpers, who were trained by those missionaries, managed PoKuNyoKwan. Nurses who were educated in Nurses' Training School, which was also established by PoKuNyoKwan, helped to run the institution as well. At the beginning, they usually had worked as a team of one medical missionary and three helpers. Since its establishment in 1903, however, the helpers began to enter the Nurses' Training School to become professional nurses, and the helpers eventually faded out because of the proliferation of those nurses. PoKuNyoKwan did not only offer medical services but also executed educational and evangelical activities. Medical missionaries struggled to overcome Koreans' ignorance and prejudice against westerners and western medical services, while they took care of their patients at office, for calls, and in hospital dispensaries. Enlightening the public by criticizing Korean traditional medical treatments including fork remedies, acupuncture, and superstitions, they helped modernization of medical systems in Korea. In the area of education, Rosetta Sherwood taught helpers basic medical science to make them regular medical staff members, and Margaret J. Edmunds established the Nurses' Training School in PoKuNyoKwan for the first time in Korea. The nurses who graduated from the school worked at PoKuNyoKwan and some other medical institutions. Evangelical activities included Bible study in the waiting rooms of PoKuNyoKwan and prayer meeting on Sunday for those who were treated in PoKuNyoKwan. The institution in the end worked as a spot for spreading Christianity in Korea. As the first women's hospital, PoKuNyoKwan attempted to educate female doctors. Eventually, it played a role as a cradle to produce Esther K Pak, who was the first female doctor in Korea. The hospital also ran the first nurse training center. It was, in a real sense, the foundational institution to raise professional practitioner undertaking medical services in Korea. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that PoKuNyoKwan provided sound basis for the development of modem medical services for women in Korea.

Commodity culture: tropical health and hygiene in the British Empire

Before heading to a 'tropical' region of the Empire, British men and women spent considerable time and effort gathering outfit believed essential for their impending trip. Ordinary items such as soap, clothing, foodstuffs and bedding became transformed into potentially life-saving items that required the fastidious attention of any would-be traveller. Everyone from scientists and physicians to missionaries and administrators was bombarded by relentless advertising and abundant advice about the outfit needed to preserve health in a tropical climate. A closer look at this marketing exercise reveals much about the way people thought about tropical people, places, health and hygiene and how scientific and commercial influences shaped this Imperial commodity culture.