'Wanted: 16 nurses of the better educated type': provision of nurses to South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This paper is based on research in progress focusing on the histories of mission hospitals in the rural communities of KwaZulu Natal, while also building on earlier research into the pluralism of medical systems within the South African Cape. Sources have been drawn from a range of historical documents, including medical and nursing journals, the archives of a number of medical missionary societies and of the Overseas Nursing Association, but the research has also been informed by oral histories of a broad cross-section of health professionals who practised in South Africa. A large literature search included a number of biographies and institutional histories. The paper will be divided into three parts--the first provides a brief background to colonialism and the early nursing history of South Africa; the second looks in more detail at the role played by missionary nurses in establishing nursing as a profession and providing training opportunities for African nurses. The final part contrasts missionary nursing with the supply of, and work done by nurses from the Overseas Nursing Association operating within their quite specific, colonial remit. This will show how the two contrasting professional spheres--one reflecting a fairly short-term commitment, the other, a much broader, 'vocational' involvement--may be seen to represent quite different colonial attitudes, and ultimately quite diverse outcomes.

[Reformation of the Medical Educational Institutes and training of general doctors during the early period of Japanese rule]

The Japanese government downgraded a Korean medical college being attached to the Daehan hospital to a medical training center blaming upon a lack of education in Korea. But the actual curriculum and the years required for completing a course of study in the Korean medical college were equivalent to those of the Japanese medical college. Furthermore, the Japanese government discarded the financial support for medical school students. So they should pay their tuitions and other stipends by themselves. The Japanese government forced a private institute to establish an endowed school by the legal act of college. It enabled to classify a medical education system with the judicial support. For the example of Severance Medical School, it reformed faculty, curriculum and facility according to the legal standard of a college act. Therefore, Severance Medical School was able to be upgraded to a medical college. But there was a limitation even for the government schools under the colonial era. It was not possible to train important medical human resource who enabled to supervise the modern medical system in Korea. On one hand, almost every important medical human resource such as a military doctor, and a professor, who should have trained in Korea in the Great Han Period, was trained in Japan. On the other hand, fostering general doctors, who practiced medicine with hands-on experience, was the purpose of medical education in Korea whether the medical school was government or private. Since the purpose of Severance Medical College was to foster general doctors, it was able to grow within the colonial medical system. The purpose of medical missionaries, who promoted the spread of gospel with the western medical support, enforced the Japanese colonial logics that the Japanese government could educate and develop Korea with the introduction of western civilization. Although it was later comparing to the government medical school. Severance Medical College enabled to certify the medical license automatically to the graduates from the school. The reason that the Japanese government allowed for Severance Medical College to issue the automatic medical license was to keep the colonial structure of Japanese in Korea.

The Anatomical Mission to Burma

Until the 1830s, most Americans were unfamiliar with the images of anatomy. Then a small vanguard of reformers and missionaries began to preach, at home and around the world, that an identification with the images and concepts of anatomy was a crucial part of the civilizing process. In his essay, Sappol charts the changes in the perception of self that resulted from this anatomical evangelism. Today, as anatomical images abound in the arts and the media, we still believe that anatomical images show us our inner reality.

Differential phenotypic variability among the Apalachee mission populations of La Florida: a diachronic perspective

Phenotypic variability is evaluated in a series of skeletal samples from the Apalachee region of Florida. Based on ethnohistoric evidence, several predictive models for changes in variability are generated. If variability decreases through time, this likely represents the effect of genetic drift in populations experiencing epidemic disease and population loss. If variability increases through time, this suggests that population aggregation or genetic admixture were primary factors shaping the Apalachee population during the mission period. Dental dimensions were collected from a series of precontact (pre-1500), early mission (AD 1633-1650) (San Pedro y San Pablo de Patale), and late mission (post-1657) (San Luis) samples from the Apalachee region and were subjected to univariate and multivariate variability analyses. The results indicate that the late mission San Luis sample was significantly more variable than the Patale or precontact samples; however, the Patale sample exhibited no significant variability change in comparison to the precontact population. This suggests that the missions initially effected limited change in genetic variability in the mission populations. However, San Luis was affected by either admixture or population aggregation to such a degree that the observed variation had increased beyond earlier levels. Given the limited historic evidence for population aggregation at this mission, and the comparatively large resident Spanish population, the increased variability may be indicative of admixture at this mission, and potentially at this mission only. Based on a limited data set, however, it appears that the mission period cannot be typified by a single evolutionary or historic process.

Clerical frames for nursing practice: missionary nurses at Rehoboth

This paper presents a discourse analysis of publications of the Christian Reformed Church regarding its Rehoboth Mission near Gallup, New Mexico, among the Navajo. All issues of The Banner, Acts of Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, the Rehoboth Hospital Bulletin, and the Annual Report of the Rehoboth Mission from 1880 to the present were reviewed for references to health-care at Rehoboth from 1903 to 1943. Four religiously framed discourses were identified: discourses justifying provision of health-care at the mission, discourses of the Navajos as immature and potentially dangerous, needing to be civilized, discourses of cleanliness, and discourses of calling. This paper adds to a growing body of knowledge about religious frames within which nurses have practiced in North America.

The medical activities of the London Jews' Society in nineteenth-century Palestine

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"Practising hygiene and fighting the natives' diseases". Public and child health in German East Africa and Tanganyika territory, 1900-1960

For reasons of population policy and missionary strategies, childcare was a relatively early issue of colonial medical policy and services in East Africa. The main challenge for the adaptation of biomedicine to the local situation proved to be not so much schemes for treatment or prevention, but rather the question of staffing. Education and employment of females, as well as social acceptance and keeping up professional standards of biomedically trained personnel, posed major obstacles to the implementation of governmental health policies. In addition to these obstacles, European prejudices about African disinterest in child health contributed to the feeling that limited progress had been made after 50 years of biomedical efforts to improve African child health.

Global and local contexts: the Northern Ogoja Leprosy Scheme, Nigeria, 1945-1960

Deriving funding from missionary sources in Ireland, Britain and the USA, and from international leprosy relief organizations such as the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association (BELRA) and drawing on developing capacities in international public health under the auspices of WHO and UNICEF through the 1950s, the Roman Catholic Mission Ogoja Leprosy Scheme applied international expertise at a local level with ever-increasing success and coverage. This paper supplements the presentation of a successful leprosy control program in missionary narratives with an appreciation of how international medical politics shaped the parameters of success and the development of therapeutic understanding in the late colonial period in Nigeria.

Memorial. Ceylon Smith Lewis 1920-2001

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"Essentially Christian, eminently philanthropic": the Mission to Lepers in British India

The early history of the Mission to Lepers in India is an interplay between politics, religion, and medicine in the context of British imperialism. The Mission pursued the dual but inseparable goals of evangelization and civilization, advancing not only a religious program but also a political and cultural one. These activities and their consequences were multi-faceted because while the missionaries pursued their religious calling, they also provided medical care to people and in places that the colonial government was unable or unwilling. Within the context of the British imperial program, the work imparted Western social and cultural ideals on the colonial populations they served, inculcated patients with Christian beliefs, and provided medical care to individuals who had been expelled from their own communities. Physical healing was intimately tied to religious salvation, spiritual healing, and the civilizing process.

The papers of Stanley Browne: leprologist and medical missionary (1907-1986)

This article elaborates a significant archival acquisition that supplement the collection documents related to the life and work of Stanley George Browne held at the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine in London, specifically his work in the Belgian Congo (from 1936 to 1959), at Uzuakoli in Nigeria (1959 to 1966), in London with the Leprosy Study Centre (1966-1980), and also in his international capacity as leprosy consultant. It also briefly refers to an endangered collection of documents, photographs, files and correspondence held in a small museum in Culion Sanatorium, The Philippines. This research is part of the International Leprosy Association Global Project on the History of Leprosy. Its results can be accessed at the site http://www.leprosyhistory.org

[Medicine and orientalism in the late nineteenth century Korea]

The paper investigates medical missionaries that exerted a significant role in establishing Western medicine in the late nineteenth century Chosun, in relation to orientalism, an academically popularized concept introduced by Edward Said. Historical analysis is focused on several important medical missionaries such as Horace N. Allen, William B. Scranton, John W. Heron, C. C. Vinton, and Oliver R. Avison to explain how their activism as medical missionary contributed to the formation of medical orientalism in which Western medicine was 'taught, studied, administered, and judged' in that period. In addition, I explore into how medical orientalism was in service of Japanese imperialism by showing that medical missionaries had to be under imperial surveillance by Japanese colonizers. The article explores the medical system of the Koryo Dynasty period and its social characteristics. First, the structure of medical system and roles of medical institutions during the Koryo Dynasty period will be summarized. Then the characteristics of the medical system will be identified through exploring the principles of its formation in a view of social recognition of medical care and a view of social recognition of medical care and a view of public policy.