In Service of Whom? Medical Missions in Hunan, China, 1920-1949

This paper examines the health work, or medical mission as was the contemporary concept, of the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) in the Hunan Province of China in the period 1920-1949. Physicians, nurses, deaconesses and deacons, foreign as well as indigenous, regarded themselves as simultaneously professional health expertise and Christian missionaries. They were stakeholders in a transnational movement which by its peak in the 1920s had resulted in considerable investments in African and Asian countries, in modern western-medicine institutions like hospitals, polyclinics and dispensaries, as well as medical faculties and educational programs for physician and nurses. Through the case of the NMS, it is in this chapter discussed how processes of loyalty and disloyalty influenced, and were influenced by, relations between donors, medical missionaries, and the receivers of the provided health services. The years between 1920-1949 are of particular interest in the case of China, since there is a development from church related donors of the medical mission institutions, to considerable donations to the institutions by global humanitarian and charitable organizations, and finally the nationalization of the medical institutions after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.