“Ploughing before Sowing”: Trust and the Architecture of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Medical Missions

Abstract

Focusing on the architecture of Church Missionary Society (CMS) hospitals in Isfahan and Kerman (Iran), this article contemplates the issue of gaining the trust of local communities. The issue of gaining trust was frequently discussed in written accounts of the CMS’s medical work as a prerequisite for introducing Christian beliefs. The article engages with emerging scholarship under the umbrella term the “history of emotions,” investigating how the hospitals were designed to create an affective connection with local communities. It demonstrates that the missionaries tried to provide a familiar environment by using local architectural elements related to the daily lives of local people. Moreover, instead of importing principles of hospital design from Britain, they actively eschewed them.

Keywords:

• architecture
• Church Missionary Society (CMS)
• History of Emotions
• Iran
• trust

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was funded by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship (Project ID GOIPG/2015/3844). Images were reproduced with the help of a research grant from the Society for Architectural Historians of Great Britain (May 2015). Special thanks to Dr. Samantha Martin-McAuliffe, Diana Periton, Dr. Jessica Kelly, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful feedback. Thanks also to my friend, James Grannell, for many hours of discussion.

Notes

Notes

1 Catherine Ironside, “In the Women’s Hospital, Ispahan,” Mercy and Truth 19, no. 228 (1915): 390.

2 For example, see Anon., “The Near East,” The Mission Hospital 42, no. 488 (1938): 213; and Anon., “Egypt and Sudan Mission,” Mercy and Truth 17, no. 199 (1913): 206.

3 Anon., “A Visit to the Old Cairo Hospital,” Mercy and Truth 9, no. 104 (1905): 249.

4 Michael Jennings, “A Matter of Vital Importance: The Place of the Medical Mission in Maternal and Child Healthcare in Tanganyika, 1919-39,” in Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa, ed. David Hardiman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 245.

5 Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

6 Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51 (2012): 209.

7 Ibid.

8 The words “interest” and “affection” were widely used by the missionaries in their statements about trust. For interest, see M. Mackenzie, “Fuh-Ning Hospital,” Mercy and Truth 8, no. 87 (1904): 77; and for affection, see Anon., “The Annual Meeting,” in Preaching and Healing: The Report of the CMS Medical Mission Auxiliary for 1902-03 (1903), 12.

9 Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena, and Karen Vallgårda, “Introduction,” in Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives, eds. Claire McLisky, Daniel Midena, and Karen Vallgårda (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

10 Anon., “Medical Missions: Plan for Advance,” Mercy and Truth 17, no. 202 (1913): 337.

11 Dr. G. E. Dodson, July 7, CMS/M/C 2/1/11, no. 18, Medical precis book 18 September–25 October 1921, CRL.

12 Dr. D. W. Carr, September 30, CMS/M/C 2/1/4, no.118, Group 2 Medical precis book 18 March 1898–6 January 1905, CRL; and Dr. D. Carr to Dr. Lankester, December 15, 1903, CMS/M/FL 1/PE 1, no. 43, CRL.

13 Thomas Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 1860-1910,” Representations no. 6 (1984): 54.

14 Alex Bremner, “The Architecture of Universities’ Mission to Central Africa: Developing a Vernacular Tradition in the Anglican Field, 1861-1909,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68 (2009): 534.

15 Ibid., 535.

16 Ibid., 529.

17 Zoë Crossland, “Signs of Mission: Material Semeiosis and Nineteenth-Century Tswana Architecture,” Signs and Society 1, no. 1 (2013): 79-113.

18 Heidi A. Walcher, In the Shadow of the King: Zill al-Sultan and Isfahan under the Qajars (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008). For the work of the CMS in Isfahan in the late nineteenth century, see ibid., ch. 6.

19 A Friend of Iran, Dawdson: the Doctor: G. E. Dodson of Iran (London: Highway, 1940), 35.

20 Karen Vallgårda, “Were Christian Missionaries Colonizers?” Interventions 18, no. 6 (2016): 874.

21 Anon., “Selections from the Proceedings of Committee,” The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 7 (new series) (1882): 188-189.

22 Ibid.

23 Walcher, In the Shadow, 206.

24 Dr. D. Carr to Dr. Lankester, December 15, 1903.

25 Anon., “Medical Missions,” in Preaching and Healing: The Report of the CMS Medical Mission Auxiliary for 1902-1903: 44.

26 For Westlake, see Winifred A. Westlake, “From Julfa to Kirman,” Mercy and Truth 8, no. 88 (1904): 116. For Dodson, see Anon., “Things to Be Noted,” Mercy and Truth 7, no. 80 (1903): 224.

27 H. Griffith, “Kirman and the Work There – II,” Mercy and Truth 6, no. 62 (1902): 51-52.

28 Mary Bird, “A Women’s Work among the Women in Julfa,” Mercy and Truth 2, no. 14 (1898): 35.

29 Walcher, In the Shadow, 210.

30 C. H. Stilman, 22 July 1904, CMS/G2/PE/0 1903-1904, no. 125. Revd. C. H. Stilman, the secretary of the Persia Mission, mentioned these two horses in a letter dated July 1904.

31 D. W. Carr, “Progress in Persia,” Mercy and Truth 9, no. 103 (1905): 208.

32 John R. Stanley, “Professionalising the Rural Medical Mission in Weixian, 1890-1925,” in Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa, ed. David Hardiman, 123. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

33 For Zende Rud and Aushagan, see W. A. Rice, “An Evangelistic Tour in Persia,” The Church Missionary Intelligencer 23 (new series) (1897): 817-22. For Feridan and Isferjoon, see, H. L. Connor, “A Year of Hospital Matron’s Work,” Mercy and Truth 2, no. 23 (1898): 81.

34 Mary Bird, “Village Work Amongst Women in Persia,” Mercy and Truth 18, no. 209 (1914): 140.

35 Iraj Afshar, Narges Pedram, and Asghar Mahdavi, Kerman dar asnad-e aminozarb: salhaye 1280-1351 ghamari [Kerman According to Amin Alzarb’s Documents between 1289 and 1351 AH] (Tehran: Soraya, 1385/2006), 339–358.

36 Anon., “Items: Home and Foreign,” Mercy and Truth 15, no. 169 (1911): 9.

37 David Hardiman, “Christian Therapy: Medical Missionaries and the Adivasis of Western India, 1880-1930,” in Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa, ed. David Hardiman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 149.

38 Samuel D. Albert, “Egypt and Mandatory Palestine and Iraq,” in Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, ed. Alex Bremner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 423–456.

39 Jeremy Taylor, Hospital and Asylum Architecture in England 1840-1914: Building for Health Care (London: Mansell, 1991).

40 Jiat-Hwee Chang, “Tropicalising Technologies of Environment and Government: The Singapore General Hospital and the Circulation of Pavilion Plan Hospital in the British Empire, 1860-1930,” in Reshaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms Achitecture and Urban Form, ed. Michael Guggenheim and ‎Ola Söderström (London: Routledge, 2010), 123–142.

41 Annmarie Adams, Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 27.

42 Jeanne Kisacky, “Germs are in the Details: Aseptic Design and General Constructors at the Lying-In Hospital of the City of New York, 1897-1901,” Construction History 28, no. 1 (2013): 83–87.

43 Ken Worpole, Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in Twentieth-Century European Culture (London: Reaktion, 2000), 49.

44 Ironside, “In the Women’s Hospital,” 390.

45 I. E. Eardley, “News from Isfahan,” The Mission Hospital 39, no. 444 (1935): 3.

46 Gholamhossein Memarian and Frank Brown, “The Shared Characteristics of Iranian and Arab Courtyard Houses,” in Courtyard Housing: Past, Present and Future, eds. Brian Edwards, Magda Sibley, Mohamad Hakim and Peter Land (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 21–30.

47 Ibid., 26.

48 Kleiss Wolfram, “Safavid Palaces,” Ars Orientalis: The Arts of Islam and the East 23 (1993), 271.

49 Jonathan Reinarz, “Receiving the Rich, Rejecting the Poor: Towards a History of Hospital Visiting in Nineteenth-Century Provisional England,” in Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting, eds. Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 38–40.

50 Ironside, “In the Women’s Hospital,” 390.

51 Ibid.

52 Eardley, “News from Isfahan,” 5.

53 Michelle Renshaw, “Family-Centred Care in American Hospitals in Late-Qing China,” in Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting, edited by Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, 61.

54 Catherine Ironside, “Open Doors in Persia,” Mercy and Truth 20, no. 235 (1916): 151.

55 Eleanor Dodson, “A Holiday Letter from Persia,” The Mission Hospital 27, no. 424 (1933): 102. Dodson visited Kerman from Multan in the summer of 1932 in response to an invitation from her brother.

56 G. E. Dodson, 1914, CMS/M/FL 1 PE2, CRL.

57 “Kerman Hospital,” CMS/H/H5/E2 (Box 6), CRL.

58 Florence M. James, “Kerman Then and Now,” The Mission Hospital 42, no. 482 (1938): 62.

59 Ibid.

60 Anon., “Editorial Notes,” Mercy and Truth 21, no. 243 (1917): 73. The missionaries also used the phrases “attractive power” and “magnetic power;” e.g. Albert Cook, “Medical Itineration: A Plea for the Effective Support of Medical Mission Work throughout the Heathen and Mohammedan World,” Mercy and Truth 6, no. 66 (1902): 175.

Additional information

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Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi

Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi was awarded a Ph.D. in architecture by the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, in March 2018. She also earned a B.Arch. from Azad University of Kerman and an M.A. in Architectural Conservation from the Art University of Isfahan.