Author: Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook

In 1881, the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church published a collection of reports from or about female missionary doctors who had gone to work in the MEC’s “mission fields” in India and China.

Women’s auxiliary groups to mission societies were not unusual in the United States. Many missionary groups refused to admit women or required that they form their own society; they could be associated with but not on the same level as the main (male) group. Funds raised by women’s groups, however, were often put into the coffers of the main organization. In the case of this Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, the group seems to have had funds enough to support female doctors in several locations over the course of the nineteenth century. This book provides brief biographies and outlines of the work done by each.

Despite what appears to the modern reader to be the de-valuation of women’s work in the missionary societies themselves, “women’s work for women” was seen to be a vital part of missionary outreach in the field — where there were female-only spaces, for instance in Hindu or Muslim countries, male missionaries were debarred automatically. Supporting female missionary doctors, then, was a way to approach natives on multiple fronts at the same time: not only were the women able to supply medical attention to men and women, they could also evangelize at the same time. The idea was that the ‘softening’ effect of medical treatment would allow the missionary doctor an automatic point of entry for the Christian gospel.

From Beecher’s dental directory of the United States (1888)

Our collection includes a series of reports from the the Henry Street Settlement House, one of the many settlement houses that sprang up across the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; some still survive, although in vastly different form.

The Henry Street House was in New York City, in a thickly settled district largely populated by immigrants and transient population. This particular settlement house was more than one building; the reports show that activities took place across the district. The visiting nursing service was established by Lillian Wald and Mary Brewster in 1893. Both Wald and Brewster were graduates of the New York Hospital Training School. It’s important to realise that both Wald and Brewster had no need to support themselves financially from their nursing work; they both had family resources to draw on and a degree of independence unusual for women at the time.

Nursing was still a new profession and nursing outside of a hospital setting generally restricted either to missions or to patients with private means who could hire a nurse to come to their home. Wald, Brewster, and others suggested a nurse associated with a particular district or, in this case, settlement house, who would be available to any resident of the district for any reason. Residents wouldn’t need to come to a clinic, they could be visited in their homes. The nurses not only functioned as nurses, medical professionals, but also as agents of cultural assimilation, demonstrating “American ways” to immigrants. Visiting nurses could and did take care of the sick, but they also tried to refer people back to the settlement house or relevant city services for things they did not provide, such as language classes or naturalization services. They also demonstrated in themselves what were felt to be some key American values: cleanliness, punctuality, preparedness. The Henry Street reports also show that visiting nurses were involved with the medicalization of motherhood, holding classes and teaching women ‘how to be mothers.’

The reports are a fascinating window into late nineteenth and early twentieth century America.

We’re planning ways to get more non-Western materials into our collection, but we do have some already, including five volumes of Kaitai shinsho, an anatomy text from the eighteenth century.

Probably best not to try any of the techniques for making your own fireworks in Robert Jones’s 1776 instructional, Artificial fireworks, improved to the modern practice, but the names alone are worth the read: drove stars, tailed stars, common stars, gold rain, silver rain.

Check out the lovely inscription on the dedication page of the 1892 Mères et nourrissons:

Page from the Album of medical commissions, 1826-1956.

A search for ‘midsummer’ in our collections doesn’t yield a ton of results but they do include two volumes of “nothing more than a hasty record” from Matthew Woods of travels in Europe in the late nineteenth century.

I don’t know about you but my “hasty record” is generally much briefer than two volumes!

Not many pieces of satire come with footnotes, but the author of Medical pomposity provides plenty!