Missionary Doctors and African Healers in Mid-Victorian South Africa

Etherington, Norman

doi:10.1080/02582478708671623

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…(pp. [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56] Postmillennial beliefs so closely resemble secular doctrines of progress springing from the European Enlightenment that the diVerence hardly seems to matter. However, attempts to explain the new era of missions by reference to Enlightenment alone run up against many examples of evangelical organizations that deliberately set their face against the French Revolution and all its works.…”

Section: Placing Missions and Empire In A Global Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…52 As the SPG missionary Charles Woodmason complained of his frontier parish in South Carolina during the 1760s, the entire backcountry seemed to be 'eaten up by Itinerant Teachers, Preachers, and Impostors from New England and Pennsylvania-Baptists, New Lights, Presbyterians, Independents, and an hundred other Sects'. 53 Despite their many diVerences, participants in British America's midcentury revivals shared a number of characteristics. The Wrst was a pervasive willingness to be 'peddlers of divinity', and to use the British Atlantic's expanding markets to spread the gospel.…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The 'missionary dream', as Hall describes it, pictured sober, docile, black Christians dedicating themselves productively to the free market, post-emancipation economy of the Caribbean-'a dream which fragmented as the missionaries came to realize, to a greater or lesser extent, that they could not control the destinies of others'. 53 Within a few years of emancipation the majority of planters in Jamaica were in debt and capital was scarce. Ignoring underlying economic factors, planters blamed their distress on the desertion of roughly half of their labour force as former slaves moved oV the plantations to cultivate their own small plots of land in the hilly parts of the island.…”

Section: Humanitarian Marginalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He combined evangelism with the everyday activities of Wshing, hunting, and trading that dominated his existence. 53 His writings suggest he was untroubled by the insider-outsider status that unsettled other new Christian evangelists. Many of his activities frankly aimed at increasing his prestige and status among the Tsimshian.…”

Section: Maretu and Ta'ungamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…147-59. 53 Patterson, 'Native Missionaries ', p. 35. 54 Peggy Brock, 'Building Bridges: Politics and Religion in a First Nations Community', Canadian Historical Review, XXIV (2000), pp.…”

Section: Maretu and Ta'ungamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Missions and Empire

2008

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The purpose of the Wve volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire was to provide a comprehensive survey of the Empire from its beginning to end, to explore the meaning of British imperialism for the ruled as well as the rulers, and to study the signiWcance of the British Empire as a theme in world history. The volumes in the Companion Series carry forward this purpose. They pursue themes that could not be covered adequately in the main series while incorporating recent research and providing fresh interpretations of signiWcant topics.

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Section: Placing Missions and Empire In A Global Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Humanitarian Marginalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Maretu and Ta'ungamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…147-59. 53 Patterson, 'Native Missionaries ', p. 35. 54 Peggy Brock, 'Building Bridges: Politics and Religion in a First Nations Community', Canadian Historical Review, XXIV (2000), pp.…”

Section: Maretu and Ta'ungamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Missions and Empire

2008

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Locating Filth: Sin, Syphilis and the Path to Purity

Ratschiller Nasim

2023

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

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This chapter explores how the Basel Mission doctors tried to spread new knowledge of hygiene in their West African mission areas by combining religious notions of purity with scientific approaches to health and colonial concepts of cleanliness. The longstanding Pietist interpretation of disease as a distorted relationship with God still held true for the Basel medical missionaries, who frequently explained physical suffering with reference to a sinful way of life. The diagnosis of syphilis, in particular, unequivocally linked disease to sin, and proved to be an effective advertising tool to promote the necessity and benefit of the medical mission beyond evangelical circles. Although there were clear indications that the prevalent condition was not syphilis, the diagnosis prevailed for twenty-five years until the young Basel Mission doctor Theodor Müller identified the illness in 1910 as yaws, which was not in fact a venereal disease like syphilis.

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Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith

Landau

1996

J. Afr. Hist.

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Southern Africans configured missionaries as medical, bodily practitioners because of the meaning of ritual specialization in southern Africa. At the same time, ‘practicing medicine’ often meant minor surgery to missionaries, who lagged behind Europe's medical advances at the turn of the century. Whereas southern Africans located their well-being in the nexus of person and community, missionaries' surgery attacked this nexus. Surgery implied, and missionaries asserted, that healing derived from a resolution of interior somatic conflicts, in which troublesome body parts might be removed. A new way of speaking about certain kinds of physical pain was developed, whereby the body briefly became a total site for illness and healing. At the same time, Nonconformist evangelism demanded that individuals rid their interior selves of unsavory forces and extract themselves from those aspects of their communal lives which generated such influences. Because both Africans and missionaries moralized illness, and because some forms of surgery, like tooth-pulling, ‘worked’ for Africans, surgery marked a rite of passage to a new group of peers: Christians, who could recontextualize the catharsis of getting well.

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Missionary Doctors and African Healers in Mid-Victorian South Africa

Cited by 10 publications

References 2 publications

Missions and Empire

Missions and Empire

Locating Filth: Sin, Syphilis and the Path to Purity

Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith

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