ABSTRACT
At the turn of the twentieth century, the subject of medical missions conjured up, for a large British audience, the image of heroic doctors and nurses applying the balm of western medicine to suffering humanity in god-forsaken corners of the globe. The medical missionary, especially the lady medical missionary, was an icon of the mission movement, appealing even to sceptical Christians, who could identify with the humanitarianism if not the evangelism of the medical mission project. Writing in 1897, the Reverend Geoffrey Lefroy of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi observed:
probably there is no branch of Mission Work which appeals more widely to popular sympathies or receives more ready and ungrudging help than that which addresses itself to the relief of sickness…in lands where western science, western methods, and western tenderness and care have not yet penetrated.1
