Dr Percy Charles Edward d'Erf Wheeler (1859-1944): a notable medical missionary of the Holy Land

Dr Percy Charles Edward d'Erf Wheeler, a medical missionary of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, spent 24 years (1885-1909) as head of the English medical institution in Jerusalem. Wheeler dedicated the years he served in Palestine to promote the medical condition of the Jews as a means of missionary work. The most significant of his achievements was his leading role in the founding of the new British Hospital for the Jews in Jerusalem, the flagship of the British presence in Palestine, to be inaugurated in 1897.

Inspirational people and care for the deprived: medical missionaries in Kashmir

Lieutenant Robert Thorpe, a soldier in the British Army in India, visited Kashmir and witnessed the suffering and sorrows of the people there in the nineteenth century; his appeal to British soldiers raised enough funds for the Church Missionary Society to send medical missionaries to the Kashmir Valley. Thus began a process that would see the opening of a 150-bed British Mission Hospital in Srinagar and the start of a new wave of educational and healthcare reforms in the region. As the medical missionary work progressed so did the avenues of research, which led to pioneering work on skin cancer. The missionary doctors and nurses made a significant difference to the lives of the people of Kashmir and their pioneering work continues to live on.

Dr Edward Macgowan (1795-1860), a long-term pioneer physician in mid-nineteenth century Jerusalem: founder and director of the first modern hospital in the Holy Land

At the age of 46, Dr Edward Macgowan, by now a well-established physician, joined the ranks of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews with the aim of establishing the first modern hospital in Palestine. For the first six months of 1842, Macgowan established his work among the Jerusalem population on a regular basis and managed to establish a close relationship with the Jewish community and some of its leaders in Jerusalem. On 12 December 1844, the Jews' Hospital was opened in Jerusalem and became a source of great pride for the missionaries. Edward Macgowan died in Jerusalem after 18 years of service and was buried in the Protestant cemetery in his beloved city.

Development of functional diarrhea, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, and dyspepsia during and after traveling outside the USA

BACKGROUND

Persistent gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms after travel abroad may be common. It remains unclear how often subjects who developed new GI symptoms while abroad have persistent symptoms on return. The objective of this retrospective study was to evaluate the prevalence of persistent GI symptoms in a healthy cohort of travelers.

METHODS

One hundred and eight consecutive patients, mostly returned missionaries, attending the University of Utah International Travel Clinic for any reason (but mostly GI symptoms) had data recorded about their bowel habits before, during, and after travel abroad. All subjects had standard hematological, biochemical, and microbiological tests to exclude known causes of their symptoms. Endoscopic procedures were performed when considered necessary by the treating physician. Diarrhea, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), bloating, and dyspepsia were defined according to the Rome II Criteria.

RESULTS

Eighty three (82% men and 18% women, median age 21 years) completed the survey with 68 subjects completing the questionnaire about bowel habits before and during travel. Among the respondents, 55 (82.1%) did not have any symptoms before travel. During travel, 41 (63%) developed new onset diarrhea; 6 (9%) developed constipation; 16 (24%) IBS, 29 (45%) bloating; and 11 (16%) dyspepsia. Of those who developed symptoms during travel, 27 (68%) had persistent diarrhea, 3 (50%) had persistent constipation, 10 (63%) had persistent IBS, 12 (43%) had persistent bloating and 8 (73%) had persistent dyspepsia. The presence of bowel symptoms during and after travel was not associated with age, gender, travel destination, or duration of travel.

CONCLUSIONS

This study suggests that new onset of diarrhea, IBS, constipation, and dyspepsia are common among subjects traveling abroad. Gastrointestinal symptoms that develop during travel abroad usually persist on return.

Medical encounters and exchange in early Canadian missions

The exchange of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge was an important facet of the encounter between native and newcomer in early Canada. Throughout New France Récollet and Jesuit missionaries were given privileged access both to indigenous peoples and indigenous plants. Curiously, however, when it came to describing medical treatments, it was people, rather than medicinal plants, that were targets of what might be called "the descriptive enterprise." Attempting to divide suspect shamanic remedies from those deemed natural, missionary observers carefully documented the context of medical treatments rather than simply the specific remedy applied for treatment. Using records left by early Canadian missionaries this paper will look at the peculiar character of medical exchange in the missions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century New France to look at the interpersonal encounters that formed a constitutive element of colonial botany and framed the way in which indigenous knowledge was represented to metropolitan audiences.

Hybridizing scholastic psychology with Chinese medicine: a seventeenth-century Chinese Catholic's conceptions of xin (mind and heart)

This paper explores the dynamics of cultural interactions between early modern China and Europe initiated by the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries through a case study of Wang Honghan, a seventeenth-century Chinese Catholic who systematically sought to integrate European learning introduced by the missionaries with pre-modern Chinese medicine. Focusing on the ways in which Wang combined his Western and Chinese sources to develop and articulate his views on xin (mind and heart), this paper argues that Wang arrived at a peculiar hybrid between scholastic psychology and Chinese medicine, not so much through a course of haphazard misunderstanding as through his conscious and patterned use and abuse of his Western sources, which was motivated most possibly by a wish to define a theoretical position that most suited his social roles as a Catholic convert and a Chinese medical doctor. Thus, rather than seeing Wang as an epitome of"transmission failure," this paper offers it as a showcase for the tremendous dynamism and creativity occurring at this East-West "contact zone as representatives of both cultures sought to appropriate and transform the symbolic and textual resources of the other side.

Investigation of Livingstone's curious point

The explorer and missionary David Livingstone was identified after death by the appearances of his humerus which had been damaged in an encounter with a lion. In his writings Livingstone suggested that the consequences of the lion's attack were not as bad as he might have expected. He wondered if this was due to the fact that he was wearing a tartan jacket when he was attacked and suggested that this curious point should be investigated. This paper looks at some of the dyes used in tartans of the time and investigates their effect on the bacteria that might be present in the mouths of lions.

[Nature, colonization, and utopia in the works of João Daniel]

The article analyzes certain aspects of "Tesouro descoberto no rio Amazonas" (Treasure discovered on the Amazon River), written by João Daniel (1722-76) during his time in the State of Maranhão e Grão-Pará as a Jesuit missionary between 1741 and 1757; the priest was banished to Lisbon two years before the Company of Jesus was expelled from Portuguese America. This unique record of the mid-eighteenth-century Amazon is a compendium on the region's wealth and potential. Most importantly, it put forward a colonization project that was critical of the model then in place; the new proposal was an integrated whole which took environmental conditions, technology, and social relations into account in the organization of local society. In centering his project on the issue of labor, João Daniel revives, as a metaphor, the idea of the Amazon as an earthly paradise-a notion that had characterized seventeenth-century missionary literature but was practically abandoned in the eighteenth century.

[Life and medical missionary activities of Esther K. Pak (1877-1910)]

Esther K. Pak (1876-1910) is believed as the first medical doctor in Korea. Esther's life can be largely reviewed in three parts: school-hood at EwhaHaktang (currently Ewha Womans University), Education in the United States, and medical missionary work after coming back to Korea from the United States. The foreign Methodist missionaries was able to enter Korea after opening of its ports and establishing its diplomatic relationship with the United States. Esther met modern sciences and Christianity at EwhaHaktang, which was founded by those missionaries. She could dream of being an American-style medical doctor in the future, while she assisted medical missionaries at PoKuNyoKwan in EwhaHaktang. She could get substantial academic help from those missionaries. With the support of Dr. Rosetta Sherwood Hall, who first introduced the world of medial science to Esther in a real sense, Esther went to the United States to study the field in 1894. While learning it, she suffered from academic frustration, economic difficulty, her husband's death and so on, but she eventually got over those adversities and completed the four years of academic courses to become a medical doctor. Her religious faith and will to help Koreans as a doctor encouraged her to finish what she had originally planned. Esther came back to Korea in 1900 and began to work earnestly as a medical missionary delegated from Woman's Foreign Missionary Society. At PoKuNyoKwan in Seoul and Woman's Hospital in Pyongyang, She performed medical work and enlightenment campaign against the superstitious healing conduct. Esther also took part in the circuit missionary performances. She devoted herself for evangelical work at Bible Institute as well. Esther's activity made people understand the effectiveness of education. She helped people to recognize education for woman, occidental medical treatment and Christianity in a positive way. On April 28, 1909, based on these excellent performances for the social development, she was invited, honored and granted a testimonial at the first welcoming ceremony, which was held by the united body of civilians and officials, for students studying abroad. But on April 13, 1910, about one year after the ceremony, she died of illness. She was 34. Although she was born at the turbulent last period of Korea Empire and lived for only 34 years, Esther's medical missionary work was evaluated as the opening of woman's participation in medical science in Korea. Not only in the 'woman's' but also in 'whole' field of medical science, her performance left significant marks in woman's and Christian history in Korea as well.

Pulmonary edema due to Plasmodium vivax malaria in an American missionary

Pulmonary edema is a recognized complication of Plasmodium falciparum malaria but is uncommon with Plasmodium vivax infection. We report the case of a non-immune adult with imported P. vivax malaria who developed pulmonary edema during treatment. The case was further complicated by a recurrent malaria episode after failure of acute quinine and doxycycline treatment followed by terminal primaquine therapy. Prompt recognition and appropriate management of pulmonary edema is needed for optimal outcomes of P. vivax infection, as well as awareness of the potential failure of terminal therapy for liver hypnozoites.

Traumatic events and posttraumatic stress in cross-cultural mission assignments

In addition to cross-cultural and environmental stressors, aid workers and missionaries are frequently exposed to trauma. We explored the frequency of traumatic events, their mental health impact, and factors associated with posttraumatic stress in two groups of missionaries, one representing a predominantly stable setting (Europe) and the other an unstable setting (West Africa). The 256 participants completed self-report measures assessing lifetime traumatic events, current posttraumatic stress, depressive and anxiety symptoms, resilience, and functioning. The rate of traumatic events was significantly higher in the unstable setting. More-frequent traumatic events were associated with higher posttraumatic stress. Factors associated with the severity of posttraumatic stress were depression, functional impairment, subjective severity and number of traumatic events, and the level of resilience.

Arthur William Douthwaite (1848-99), Order of the Double Dragon, MD (USA) FRGS: evangelist, medical missionary, explorer

Dr Douthwaite AW was first and foremost an evangelist. He became a doctor in order that he would be able better to follow his vocation of seeking to convert the people of China to Christianity. After an unhappy childhood and misspent youth, Douthwaite was converted to Christianity and went to China as a medical missionary. His only qualification was four years as an apothecary's apprentice and a short attachment at the London Hospital but he soon earned a high reputation as a healer and evangelist. During his first furlough, Douthwaite went to America and gained a full medical qualification. On his return to China, he was sent to Chefoo where he oversaw the development of a major mission station, which included one of the first medical schools for native students. His premature death from dysentery at the age of 51 prevented him from achieving even greater things.

Of germs, public hygiene, and the healthy body: the making of the medicalizing state in Thailand

The historical study of Western medicine in nineteenth-century Siam has emphasized the dichotomy between Western medicine and traditional Thai medical practice. The former is often represented as a monolith, and the epistemological transformation of Western medicine during the nineteenth century is glossed over without sufficient attention. Pasteurian medicine, especially the idea of germs, was introduced to Siam by the American missionary Dan Beach Bradley. Its introduction spurred a process of negotiation with both pre-Pasteurian Western and traditional Thai medicine. In its pre-Pasteurian and Pasteurian variants, Western medicine was constituted as a new medical practice and disciplinary regime in Siam. As a discursive instrument of state hegemony, the ideas, structures, policies, and institutions of Western medicine furthered the understanding and management of virulent epidemics, the institution of the sanitary system, the shaping of new concepts of population and a healthy workforce, and not least, the framing of a medicalizing project to police people's bodies pursued by the Thai state in the 1930s.

[Albert Schweitzer. The man as a symbol]

Albert Schweitzer, the great missionary physician from the XXth century, had a versatile personality that integrated multiple talents, leading to the slightly frequent conjunction of the thinker with the man of action, and the humanist with the scientist and the artist. He studied all these disciplines in a brilliant manner: Philosophy, Theology, Music and Medicine; he was also a great scholar of Bach's work, Jesus Christ and the civilization history. In his maturity, this great man renounced to the fame and glory gained as intellectual and musician, to dedicate his life as a physician for the forgotten African natives. His deeply religious spirit allowed him to penetrate into the most recondite of the human soul; in his personality, he expressed in its entire dimension the eternally unsatisfied desire of the solitary man, against the immensity of the universe. His philosophy, based on the respect for life, was realized throughout the practice of the medical profession. His noble character and personality was based on the man as symbol, since it was not so much what he did helping people but what people could do to others due to him. His singular example represented a moral force in the world, superior to millions of men armed for a war. In 1953, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his philanthropic work in Africa during more that fifty years, and for his deep love to the living beings. He was transformed in a perennial legend as the Lambaréné doctor.

Secularizing the pain of footbinding in China: missionary and medical stagings of the universal body

How did foreign Christian anti-footbinding activists treat the distinctive forms of human embodiment they encountered in China? What were their assumptions? How should we understand the transition from religious to secular imaginings of the body and its pains? Here I discuss late nineteenth and early twentieth century religion and medicalized hygiene through the voices of two English people who campaigned against and wrote extensively about footbinding. Not an easy story about God traded for Nature, but a far more uneasy and subliminal borrowing and cross-fertilization of tropes between the religious and the scientific. In both evangelical religion and biological science our protagonists created powerful narrative technologies for making cultural process disappear into nature, and thus to re-channel agency, making it available for new projects. Here we see the secular and the religious informing and reinforcing one another as moments in the creation of the modern.

Not just malaria: Mary Slessor (1848-1915) and other Victorian missionaries in West Africa

Fear of 'fever' was uppermost in the minds of many travellers to West Africa in Victorian times. 'Not just malaria...' chronicles attitudes, treatments and discoveries regarding malaria from the time of David Livingstone through the early 20th century. Missionaries often found themselves in the position of serving as untrained doctors and nurses among the people they went to evangelize. In addition, they suffered from the same maladies as the people did, and many died from malaria or other afflictions. Mary Slessor arrived in Calabar, in what is now southeastern Nigeria, to serve with the Scottish Presbyterian Mission in 1876. With only a few furloughs, she remained there until her death in 1915. The article relates instances of the illnesses and injuries she treated as well as those she suffered herself. She is remembered in Nigeria with statues and, along with David Livingstone, is one of Scotland's best-known missionary figures.

"Evolutionist and missionary," The Reverend John Thomas Gulick (1832-1923). Part I: cumulative segregation--geographical isolation

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American missionary and naturalist John Thomas Gulick (1832-1923) was one of the most well-known and influential evolutionists, anticipating in his research and writing, later proposals of geographical isolation, population genetics, genetic drift, and the founder principle in speciation. In over 20 publications based on studies of non-adaptive geographical variation in several hundred species of snails in the genus Achatinella, collected in the valleys of Oahu in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), Gulick provided evidence for the formation of new species from varieties and the importance of geographical (non-adaptive) isolation in species diversification. Gulick's theory of the species-differentiating effects of isolation was regarded by many as a more complete theory of speciation than Darwin's, and by others as correcting a fundamental deficiency in Darwin's theory, namely how groups of organisms diversify one from another. Gulick also saw organisms as active participants in, and in interaction with, their environment, for which he coined the term coincident selection, anticipating the Baldwin effect/organic selection. With his concepts of cumulative segregation (geographical isolation), indiscriminate isolation (the Founder effect) and coincident selection (the Baldwin effect), we should recognize Gulick as one of the earliest and most original and innovative evolutionary biologists.

[The gaze of the others: how the Western medical missionaries viewed the traditional Korean medicine]

It is generally known that the Western medical missionaries played an important role in introducing Western medicine into Korea. However, little is known about their role in introducing traditional medicine of Korea to the Western world. The present paper aims at showing various efforts of the Western medical missionaries to understand the Korean traditional medicine and to introduce it to the Western world. Allen payed attention to the clinical effect and commercial value of the Ginseng; Busteed gave anthropological descriptions of the traditional medical practice; Landis translated a part of the most cherished medical textbook of Korean traditional medicine Dong-Eui-Bo-Gam (see text) into English; Mills, along with his colleagues in Severance Union Medical College, tried more scientific approaches toward the traditional medicine. All these various efforts proves that the attitudes of the Western medical missionaries cannot be summarized as one simplistic view, that is, the orientalism, a term which is quite en vogue today. Of course, we cannot deny that there may be such elements, but to simplify the whole history as such does not only reflect the fact, but also miss a lot of things to be reflected in history.

Mukden Medical College (1911-1949): an outpost of Edinburgh medicine in northeast China. Part 1: 1882-1917; building the foundations and opening the college

Scottish physician Dugald Christie, an 1881 licentiate of both the RCPE and the RCSEd, was the first medical missionary sent to China by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. He commenced practice in the city of Mukden (Shenyang) in Manchuria in 1883. In 1892 he started to train student assistants and in 1911 founded the Mukden Medical College (Fengtian yi ke da xue). Edinburgh-trained physicians and surgeons largely staffed this college, the first Western medical school in Manchuria.

Spiritual healing of disrupted childhood

This essay suggests ways in which spiritual resources--healing stories, psalms of lament and reassurance, rituals, and meditative practices--can be used to foster emotional and spiritual healing for people, such as the adult children of missionaries, who have experienced disrupted relationships with parents during childhood.