to develop them. But where they were established they sometimes proved a Trojan Horse for mission-field organization. The missionary doctor was often, though not always, a layman, but he could neither be treated as an ancillary worker nor fitted into the clerical command structure. This was ensured by the professionalization of medicine in the middle of the nineteenth century; indeed, before that time western medicine probably had little, at least outside of the field of surgery, to offer the rest of the world. (Many of the missionaries who died in the ‘white man’s grave’ of West Africa must have been offered on the grisly altar of medical science.) Early

The second, and still more transformative influence, was the steadily increasing indispensability of the woman missionary. As with so many aspects of the Protestant missionary movement, the woman missionary happened by accident; no one planned her or developed her concept as a strategic instrument. Even leaving out of consideration such wholly exceptional figures as the extraordinary Hannah Kilham, exercising her Quakerly concerns in West African education, linguistics and agriculture in the early nineteenth century (and one might add equally extraordinary Roman Catholic women such as La Mère Anne-Marie Javouhey) it is hard to identify the first female missionary. From the earliest times wives of missionaries, regarded by the missionary societies as present essentially for their family role, regularly undertook missionary duties. Many early missionaries commenced schools; their wives frequently commenced schools or classes for girls and extended their responsibilities into other aspects of the women’s world, still envisaged as an extension of their husbands’ activity. Every so often, wifely enterprise would blossom into a significant institutional commitment and in such cases a crisis might arise on the death or departure of the lady or her husband, which could only be resolved by appointing a female replacement. This was happening at least from1820.41 No one was intending to create a category of women missionaries, nor questioning the assumption that a ‘real’ missionary was an ordained minister of the gospel; they were simply seeking a means of maintaining the valuable work begun by the late excellent Mrs Jones. Then it became clear that India in particular had whole areas of life shut off from male view; only women could ever have any hope of entering those areas. So in India, and then in England and Scotland, societies for female education emerged, to recruit Christian teachers to reach women and girls. It was some time before these societies, often the result of the concern of devout residents of India, came formally within the orbit of the missions, but they usually worked in relation to missions and (sometimes to the dismay of their organizers) their teachers often married serving missionaries. It took some time