The Story of our Health Message

Foreign Medical Missionary Work

The union of the medical and missionary work was providentially associated with the very beginnings of the modern missionary movement. It was in 1785 that Dr. John Thomas, a young physician on board an East Indian vessel, went ashore in Calcutta. The suffering and squalor of the people touched his heart, and instead of going back home as he had intended, he remained and for seven years devoted his life to the suffering poor in that great city. Then, with failing health, he returned home, earnestly praying that the Lord would send forth laborers into the great heathen lands of earth. SHM 260.2

Even as he was praying, William Carey and Andrew Fuller were meeting and talking together about missions. Soon after landing in England, Dr. Thomas met these two men and shared with them the burden for foreign missions. When, in November of that year (1792), the Baptist Missionary Society was formed, the first missionary appointed by them was Dr. John Thomas. The second was William Carey. They both went to India, and seven years later the first convert from Hinduism was baptized in the Ganges. This Hindu, while working on the house in which the missionaries lived, had fallen and been severely injured. “The doctor attended him, preached to him, by act as well as by word, and so he won him to Christ.”—Dr. George D. Dowkontt, in The Medical Missionary, July, 1905. SHM 260.3

A few years later, in 1818, Dr. John Scudder, a young physician in New York, reading a little book descriptive of native life in India, was so touched with sympathy for the poor people of that land that he decided to give up his opportunity for fame and fortune at home in order that he might give his life to them. He and his wife labored self-sacrificingly and devotedly in India for a period of thirty-five years. SHM 261.1

His was a missionary family. Of his seven sons and three daughters, all but one daughter became missionaries. Five of his sons became physicians, following in the footsteps of their father, Dr. John Scudder, “the first medical missionary to leave the United States for heathen lands.”—Ibid. SHM 261.2