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Canadian physician Peter Vaughan recently participated in a medical mission in Guatemala. He recalled that a visit to the war-torn country 20 years earlier had inspired him to go into medicine; his return visit this past March to share his medical skills reconfirmed his decision.
A massive outbreak of polio in Bethlehem, Israel was the impetus that led the Holy Land Christian Mission to spark a drive to build a hospital facility there. Through a carefully planned direct mail campaign, face-to-face solicitation, and commitment, the overall total cash income for the campaign's first three months was up 161%.
Community surveys are essential to estimate health indicators, evaluate health programs, and define health interventions. In 2002, a cross-sectional survey of children under five was conducted in 18 areas of the poorest counties in North and Northeast Brazil. Nine areas were visited by volunteer community health workers (CHW) under the Children's Mission, and the others were not visited. Using a standard questionnaire, trained interviewers collected information at the household level for 1,528 children, 782 of whom were visited monthly by CHWs and 772 were not. All the children and their families were living below the poverty line; 40.0% of the parents were illiterate, per capita daily income was about US$0.30, and household conditions were substandard. However, most were living less than 1km from a public health service and almost all children who were referred to these services received medical care. Prenatal care was also poor in terms of number of medical visits and laboratory tests. Children visited by CHWs from the Children's Mission received better care in terms of growth monitoring, number of medical check-ups, and prenatal iron supplementation.
All orthopaedic and trauma patients admitted to Holy Cross Hospital in the Transkei during the year 1974 have been surveyed and classified by disease type. These patients formed 8% of all admissions but occupied 16% of the beds and contributed 26% of the procedures in the main operating theatre. The significance of these findings is considered briefly.
The surgeons that ensure humanitarian assignments (in non-governmental organizations) must operate, most often in difficult material conditions, injured and ill patients whose conditions belong the most various fields of surgery, in both war and peace practice. The evolution of surgical training towards overspecialization proves to be less and less compatible with the requirements of such assignments.
High hopes for opening new markets, locating natural resources and the 'advance of civilisation' were built into the plans for Victorian expeditions to Africa. When an expedition failed to deliver on these goals, criticisms of individual explorers and the entire 'civilising mission' project could result. The Zambesi Expedition, led by David Livingstone, received just such criticism when politics and geography obstructed the realisation of its aims. The needs of a growing industrial sector contributed to the organisation of the Expedition but also set the criteria by which its success or failure would be judged.
Dow Hospital is one of the western medical hospitals and the earliest established by American Presbyterian Mission in 1885 in downtown Beijing. It is good at Obstetrics and Gynecology and Pediatrics. It had been playing the role of spreading advanced western medical science. It is a pioneer of transmitting new method of delivery in Beijing and was changed to Beijing Sixth Municipal Hospital since 1949.
A system is described for fluoridation of a small community water supply. The design of the equipment is presented in relation to the requirements of a particular isolated region and in a basis for application to other similar areas. The problems found during the establishment of this system and their solution can be valuable as a guide for other communities.
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.
The Reverend Doctor Robert Laws (1851-1934) followed in the footsteps of David Livingstone to Central Africa. At the beginning of a long and distinguished career as a medical missionary in Christian service to the country that has since become the Republic of Malawi, he was a prime mover in the setting up of a mission station at Cape Maclear, on the shores of Lake Malawi (formerly known as Lake Nyasa and closely associated with the discoveries of Doctor Livingstone). There, on 2 March 1876, Laws used chloroform to produce surgical anaesthesia when he operated on a young African male who had a cystic tumour above his left eye.
Guangzhou Boji Hospital (The Canton Hospital) was the most famous western medical hospital established in 1835. John G. Kerr, an American doctor with the Presbyterian Mission, was the founder of the hosptial. He became the director of Boji Hospital in 1855 and worked there for 44 years. Chen Mengnan, Kang Guangren, Sun Yatsen (Zhongshan), Zheng Shiliang, Zhang Zhujun and Shi Jingran were medical students of Boji Hospital in this period. They had made important contributions to China during the rapid changing society of the late Qing dynasty.
From the first moment of the UMCA's incursion into the African interior, the greatest challenge it faced was the problem of mortality and morbidity. Between 1860 and 1918, over one-third of the mission staff were lost to death, or invalided out due to ill-health. This article tracks the institutional response to the problems of death and disease, and seeks to explain why, from the mid-1890s, there was a notable downward shift, both in the numbers of missionaries dying, and in the numbers forced to retire through sickness. For the first 35 years of the UMCA's existence, it paid little attention to establishing and enforcing a disease-management strategy. Health issues were left to the individual missionaries, and medical policy (in as much as the UMCA can be said to have had a 'policy' before the mid-1890s) was driven by the periphery. A mortality crisis in the 1890s refocused the attention of the Mission authorities on the need to establish more rigorous procedures for overcoming the impact of disease. Control over medical policy was centralized, and structures established for the better enunciation and enforcement of this policy. This institutional response ensured an improvement in the health environment of the missionaries, and consequent reductions in the impact of disease upon the UMCA.
In this study, 157 patients who underwent surgery for peptic ulcer disease in a 215-bed mission hospital in Nyeri, Kenya were evaluated. One hundred and thirty seven patients (87.3%) had duodenal ulcer. Vagotomy and drainage was performed in 82.8% with an overall mortality of 1.3%. There were no serious complications during operation but side effects were experienced during the post operative period. Various aspects of peptic ulcer surgery are discussed.
Approximately 315 major surgical cases were treated in one year in a one-doctor 80-bed mission hospital in Nigeria. The hospital serves a population of 137,000. One hundred and forty-three of the cases were herniorrhaphies: 19 of these cases were strangulated, of which seven required bowel resection. A case of a strangulated inguinal hernia containing uterus, Fallopian tubes and ovaries is reported. Other interesting surgical cases are also discussed.
Heat stroke is hardly seen in Malaysia. However, it occurs commonly in Saudi Arabia during the Haj season. Many Malaysian pilgrims are affected every year and some die. Having faced this environmental hazard for eight years, the Malaysian Medical Mission, sent each year to look after our pilgrims, modified its treatment strategy in 1988 and successfully decreased the overall morbidity and mortality of affected patients without the use of sophisticated equipment. A brief account of the management of 17 cases seen in 1988 is given. Only one died following treatment. The rest recovered fully without any residual neurological deficit or other complications.
Mission hospital doctors enjoy general practice in its widest and most exciting sense, working wherever they are needed. They will be teamwork specialists, organizing their teams to prevent and treat disease. They will care for the whole person, spreading the Gospel by the way they live as well as by their words.
The mission of the Christ United Methodist Church of the Deaf has been to provide a cross-cultural experience with deaf and hearing impaired persons from other countries. In this way, deaf members from the United States not only give of themselves in ministry and in service, but also share and gain invaluable insight into the lives of the deaf all over the world.
Within the context of national traditions in colonial science, the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries present us with a unique combination of challenges. The multinational membership of the Society of Jesus gave its missionaries access to virtually every Portuguese, Spanish, and French colony. The Society was thus compelled to engage an astonishingly diverse array of cultural and natural environments, and that diversity of contexts is reflected in the range and the complexity of Jesuit scientific practices. Underlying that complexity, however, was what I see as a unique combination of institutional structures; namely, European colleges, overseas mission stations, and the regular circulation of personnel and information. With this institutional framework as a backdrop, I briefly trace what I see as the most salient themes emerging from recent studies of Jesuit overseas science: (1) the Societys ability to use scientific expertise to its advantage amid the complex web of dependencies upon which it missionary activities rested; (2) the ability of its missionaries to become intimate with a wide range of cultures and to appropriate natural knowledge held by indigenous peoples, especially in the fields of material medica and geography; and (3) the different ways Jesuits used published accounts of "remote nature" (i.e., natural histories of overseas colonies) to advance their corporate and religious causes.