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 Medical Mission^''®'* 
 
 ISABELLA BIRD BISHOP. 
 
 We have received permission to print the 
 following valuable article by Mrs. Isabella 
 Bird Bishop, whose charming books of travel 
 have made friends for her in many homes. It 
 was read in the Woman’s Congress at the 
 World’s Fair in 1893, and while it was incor- 
 porated in the report of that Congress, it has 
 not been printed, as a whole, in any periodical 
 except Mission Studies. Mrs. Bishop’s per- 
 sonal observation in many lands gives weight 
 to her words, and her testimony is the more 
 valuable because it is given from the stand- 
 point of an intelligent and unprejudiced trav 
 eller. 
 
 I T is as a traveller that I am to address 
 this audience, and as one who has 
 been converted from indifferentism 
 to the duty and importance of mission- 
 ary effort by seeing in the foreign mission 
 field the work and influence of the con- 
 secrated lives of Christian men and wo- 
 men, many of them citizens of your great 
 republic. In four years and a half of 
 Asiatic travelling during most of which 
 
time I have lived among the people with 
 an interpreter, I have learned of the sore 
 needs of the unchristianized world, with 
 its sorrows and its sins. 
 
 Here and in Britain, those who stay at 
 home and help missions naturally dwell 
 more on the work done— to me it is the 
 work undone which bulks appallingly, 
 the ten hundred and thirty millions with- 
 out Christianity nineteen centuries after 
 His birth, and the awful fact that in spite 
 of the increased activity of the church, 
 heathenism has so gained upon our ef- 
 forts that while something like four mil- 
 lions of persons have received baptism 
 on making a Christian profession within 
 this century, the natural increase of the 
 world’s non-Christian population has been 
 two hundred millions in the same time. 
 It may be that “the times of this ignor- 
 ance God winked at,” when our knowl- 
 age was but of the fringe of heathendom, 
 but in our age, when travelers have 
 scarcely left any region untouched, and 
 Geographical. Ethnographical, and An- 
 
3 
 
 thropological societies bring the knowl- 
 edge of "Dark Continents’’ and the con- 
 dition of their peoples to our very doors, 
 apathy or half heartedness is without ex- 
 cuse, and our responsibility is vastly in- 
 creased by our enlightenment. 
 
 On no point is our modern information 
 more explicit than on the amount of suf- 
 fering which is everywhere the result of 
 native methods of medical treatment, 
 and in little more than half a century, the 
 church, waking up at last to see that in 
 order to do her Lord’s work she must 
 adopt her Lord’s methods, has increased 
 her number of medical missionaries from 
 something under ten, to three hundred 
 and fifty-nine, seventy-four of whom are 
 women, all pledged to the Master's 
 double command, “Heal the sick, and 
 preach the Gospel.’’ But what are they 
 among so many? 
 
 But what does illness usually mean in 
 non-Ghristian lands? We must remem- 
 ber that throughout the greater part of 
 '-he heathen world, illness is believed to 
 
4 
 
 be the work of demons, or more correct- 
 ly a form of demonical possession, and a 
 sick person is an object of loathing as 
 well as of fear. The house is regarded 
 as polluted by his presence, in many lands 
 he is removed to an out-building where 
 he is supplied once a day with food and 
 water, and he is shunned by his nearest 
 relations. 
 
 If his healing is desired, the doctors 
 and priests are summoned gongs and 
 drums are beaten, fires are lighted as the 
 centres of diabolical dances accompanied 
 by frenzied chants, incantations and ex- 
 orcisms are resorted to, the stomach of 
 the patient is beaten with clubs to drive 
 out the supposed demon, he is subjected 
 to untenable tortures, and often when 
 the malady becomes chronic, or is severe- 
 ly infectious, he is carried to a mountain 
 top or river bank, supplied with a little 
 food and water and is left to die alone. 
 
 In the case of women, the barbarities 
 inflicted by those who profess to attend 
 them in sickness, cannot be related in 
 
5 
 
 such an audience. It is enough to say 
 that native midwifery abounds in ignor- 
 ant and brutal customs, which in thou- 
 sands of cases produce life-long suffer- 
 ing, and in many, fatal results. 
 
 In all countries a belief in the efficacy 
 of certain idols, shrines, stones, trees or 
 waters prevails, and no Buddhist, Hindu 
 or Moslem would spend an hour of the 
 day or night without a charm, amulet, or 
 talisman, purchased from the priests, 
 round his neck or arm, with the object 
 of warding off sickness. 
 
 The shrines of the medicine gods of all 
 nations are sure of votaries and offerings, 
 and even in modern Japan the red lac- 
 quer medicine god Binzuree is universal- 
 ly resorted to by and for the sick, the 
 method of invocation consisting in rub- 
 bing with the finger that part of the idol’s 
 person which corresponds to the afflicted 
 part of the patient. 
 
 Of the sanitary and anti-septic precau- 
 tions required in sickness these people 
 have no knowledge, and their wounds. 
 
6 
 
 whether natural or artificial, are. in the 
 hot weather, alive with maggots. 
 
 The alleviations which in Christian 
 countries mitigate the sufferings of the 
 dying are unknown to them, and they re- 
 gard death as the triumph of the sup- 
 posed demon. Amidst beatings of 
 gongs, drummings, shoutings and incan- 
 tations, with their dying thirst unas- 
 suaged, and with their nostrils plugged 
 with a mixture of aromatic herbs and 
 clay, or with mud of sacred streams, our 
 heathen brethren and sisters are passing 
 in an unending, ghastly, reproachful pro- 
 cession into Ghristless graves at the rate 
 of forty-three millions a year. 
 
 Ghastliest and most solemn thought, 
 that for every minute in which we have 
 been assembled here, eighty-three 
 Ghristless souls from death beds such as 
 these have passed into the presence of 
 their Judge — and ours! 
 
 Their physicial woes justly move us, 
 but their Christlessness and hopeless- 
 ness have an infinity of piteousness- 
 
7 
 
 Over their sick beds no Divine Comfort- 
 er broods, no relation of the Fatherhood 
 of God or the Brotherhood of Christ has 
 reached their ears, or one glimmer of 
 that light which He Who is the resurrec- 
 tion and the life has shed on the future 
 of the human spirit. Where are our ag- 
 onizing prayers, where is our heart-brok- 
 enness, where is our great personal self- 
 denial for the heathen? 
 
 “Oh that my head were waters, and 
 mine eyes a fountain of tears that 1 
 might weep day and night for the slain,' 
 groans the prophet Jeremiah. When St. 
 Paul wrote of these “whose end is de- 
 struction,” it was on a page blotted with 
 tears, and when He Who alone knows 
 what destruction is beheld the city which 
 was to reject Him His tears flowed over 
 its self-chosen doom. 
 
 Nearly all doors are now open to the 
 medical missionary. Who will enter in. 
 of you my Christian sisters? The person 
 of the Hakim is every where sacred. It 
 is the glorious work of the missionary 
 
8 
 
 physician to overthrow those barbarous 
 systems of medical treatment to which I 
 have briefly alluded, and to substitute 
 for them the scientific methods, the skill, 
 and the suavities of European medicine, 
 as well as to inculcate tenderness for 
 suffering and reverence for human life, 
 and to our medical sisters is the honor 
 given to enter the domestic bastiles of 
 the east with healing and light, and to 
 make an end by their skilled and benefi- 
 cent methods of the barbarous practices 
 of native midwifery, and of the many 
 remediable sufferings of our own sex. 
 
 But it is as the missionary physician, 
 "the Hakim in Christ’s likenes," "the 
 Hakim with the Bible," that the medical 
 missionary follows in His Master’s foot- 
 steps. He must subvert worse systems 
 even than those of the native treatment 
 of diseases. In the dispensary, the 
 home, and especially in the hospital he 
 has opportunities which fall to the lot of 
 no other of awakening a sense of the dis- 
 ease of sin — of sin which cannot be 
 
9 
 
 atoned for by penances, pilgrimages, or 
 gifts, or washed away by ceremonial ab- 
 lutions and of gently opening the blind 
 eyes to the love and atonement of Him 
 Whose servant he is. In Moslem and 
 Buddhist lands the evangelistic mission- 
 ary is unsought, unwelcomed, shunned. 
 He must create his work by slow and 
 persevering toil, and at the best he rare- 
 ly reaches the undercurrents of the 
 thoughts and life of the people among 
 whom he dwells. In the case of the 
 medical missionary the work seeks him, 
 claims him, pursues him, absorbs him, 
 Crowds, compelled by the grip of pain, 
 throng around him, and as soon as his 
 stammering tongue can speak of Jesus 
 his audience is ready to listen. Without 
 effort he learns the inner lives, the relig- 
 ious ideas, the superstitions, the social 
 difficulties, criticisms on Christianity, 
 the pressure of circumstances, the ig- 
 norance and the craving of all classes, 
 and some at least, of those who have 
 learned to love and trust the servant. 
 
10 
 
 are won to love and trust the Master. 
 
 In a survey of many mission fields, and 
 of vast, unevangelized regions, especially 
 in Asia, where Christianity comes into 
 contact with Islam, and the higher phil- 
 osophical non-Christian systems, I have 
 come to think that the multiplication of 
 male and female medical missionaries is 
 the most important work in connection 
 with the missions which lies before the 
 church, as well as the most blessed form 
 of missionary effort to which young men 
 and women who are consecrated to for- 
 eign service can aspire. 
 
 Bodily suffering and spiritual blind- 
 ness are calling with an exceeding bitter 
 cry for the life-work of consecrated men 
 and women but the need can be met by 
 the consecrated alone. 
 
 For the half-hearted, the indolent, the 
 selfish, the doubting, and the unloving, 
 there is no call and no room. There 
 must be the "double qualification," — in- 
 tense love to Christ, and intense love 
 for those for whom He died. 
 
11 
 
 In conclusion, 1 desire to emphasize 
 my unqualified testimony to the value 
 and power of medical missions. To my 
 thinking none follow more closely in the 
 Master’s footprints than the medical 
 missionary, and in no work are the high- 
 er teachings of Christianity more legible 
 and easily recognized. The true mis- 
 sionary-doctor witnesses by his life- 
 work to Christ the Healer, and is an 
 epistle of Christ, translating Christ’s love 
 and teaching, into object lessons which 
 all can understand. 
 
 Once again the lame walk, the deaf 
 hear, the blind see, to the poor the Gos- 
 pel is preached, and if the lepers are not 
 cleansed, the miseries of their condition 
 are greatly mitigated. 
 
 In looking back upon medical missions 
 in different parts of the world, I cannot 
 recall one where the physician was 
 truly “a Hakim in Christ's likeness” 
 which was not healing, helping, blessing, 
 making an end of much of the cruelty 
 which proceeds from ignorance, soften- 
 
12 
 
 ing prejudice against Christianity, open- 
 ing closed doors for the Gospel, and 
 while pointing to the cross which is ele- 
 vated for “the healing of the nations,” 
 telling in every work of love and of con- 
 secrated skill of the infinite compassions 
 of Him Who came "not to destroy men's 
 lives but to save them.” 
 
 IVoman's Board of Missions of the Interior, 
 Room £2 j, 40 Dearborn St., Chicago, III,