Abstract
In the previous chapter, I explored how missionaries responded to sickness overseas and how they developed a framework that powerfully linked sickness, ‘heathenism’ and ‘otherness’. In claiming a healing role for missionaries, they indirectly aligned themselves with ‘healthiness’. In this chapter, I ask how, given this framework, missionaries responded to their own illnesses and those of their friends and colleagues in the ’foreign field’. In doing so, I use sickness to explore discourses of difference (principally those of gender, age, health and location) internal to the missionary ‘self’ and think about how the experience of sickness overseas could both potentially threaten the lines around which missionaries constructed colonial difference and re-encrust them. Sickness provides a useful way into these ‘internal’ differences not only because of the anxiety it generates, but because it is a subject that utterly pervades missionary correspondence.
Missionaries generally are sent to unhealthy and uncongenial regions.1
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Notes
E. Storrow (1888) Protestant Missions in Pagan Lands: a manual of facts and principles relating to foreign missions throughout the world (London: John Snow), p. 138.
Markku Hokkanen’s study of the Livingstonia mission in northern Malawi is a striking exception to this, including accounts of missionary encounters with ‘blackwater’ and other ‘tropical’ diseases. M. Hokkanen (2007) Medicine and Scottish Missionaries in the Northern Malawi Region, 1875–1930: quests for health in a colonial society (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press), pp. 212–30.
A. Porter (2004) Religion versus Empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 57.
R. Lovett (1899) The History of the London Missionary Society, 1795–1895, vols 1 and 2 (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 477–80.
R. Brewin (1889) Among the Palms: or stories of Sierra Leone and its missions (London: Andrew Crombie).
G. Endfield and D. Nash (2005) ‘“Happy is the Bride the Rain Falls On”: climate, health and “the woman question” in nineteenth-century missionary documentation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30, p. 374.
R. Seton (1996) “Open Doors for Female Labourers”: women candidates of the London Missionary Society, 1875–1914’ in R. Bickers and R. Seton, eds. Missionary Encounters: sources and issues (Surrey: Curzon), pp. 63–4.
M. P. Ashley (2001) ‘It’s Only Teething … A report of the myths and modern approaches to teething’, British Dental Journal, 191 (1), pp. 4–8.
L. N. Magner (1992) A History of Medicine (New York: Dekker), p. 279.
B. Haley (1978) The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
R. Porter (2006) ‘Medical Science’ in R. Porter, ed. The Cambridge History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 152–4. Magner, A History of Medicine, p. 321.
Usually, they only chose to engage with European medicine, but missionaries in both India and southern Africa do sometimes resort to indigenous remedies. For a discussion of this in the African case, see N. Etherington (1987) ‘Missionary Doctors and African Healers in Mid-Victorian South Africa’, South African Historical Journal, 19, pp. 77–93.
P. M. Logan (1997) Nerves and Narratives: a cultural history of hysteria in 19thcentury British prose (Berkeley: University of California Press).
K. O. Kupperman (1984) ‘Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 42 (2), pp. 213.
M. Harrison (1999) Climates and Constitutions: health, race, environment and British imperialism in India 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 10.
K. Kiple and C. O. Kriemhild (1996) ‘Race, War and Tropical Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean’ in D. Arnold, ed. Warm Climates and Western Medicines (Amsterdam: Rodopi), pp. 65–80.
M. Bell (1993) ‘“The Pestilence that Walketh in Darkness”: imperial health, gender and images of South Africa c. 1880–1910’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geography, 18, pp. 335, 332.
M. Wallace (1827) quoted in Endfield and Nash, “Happy is the Bride”, p. 375.
Such as eating less meat, for example. E. M. Collingham (2001) Imperial Bodies: the physical experiences of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 26–7.
M. Harrison (1996) ‘“The Tender Frame of Man”: disease, climate, and racial difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70, pp. 68–93.
W. Anderson (1996) ‘Race and Acclimatization in Colonial Medicine: disease, race, and Empire’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70, pp. 62–7. Stoler has similarly explored the ways in which such thinking could cast ‘degeneration’ in both physical and moral tones.
A. L. Stoler (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the colonial order of things (London: Duke University Press)
and A. L. Stoler (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: race and the intimate in colonial rule (Berkeley: University of California Press).
P. Jalland (1996) Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
J. Whaley, ed. (1981) Mirrors of Mortality: studies in the social history of death (London: Europa);
M. Wheeler (1990) Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
R. Price (2008) Making Empire: colonial encounters and the creation of imperial rule in nineteenth-centuryAfrica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 74–5.
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© 2012 Esme Cleall
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Cleall, E. (2012). Illness on the Mission Station: Sickness and the Presentation of the ‘Self’. In: Missionary Discourses of Difference. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032393_5
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