A Centenary Retrospective: Christian Medical Missions and Medical Anthropology

Abstract

This retrospective provides a brief history of Christian medical missions as the critical backdrop to understanding how missions in the 19^th and 20^th centuries paved the way for ethnographic work among non-Western culture groups, as well as provided insights into other cultures’ health and healing practices. Medical missions also brought biomedicine into the care systems of non-Western cultures and set the stage for understanding the importance of cultural knowledge in determinants of health and disease.  These endeavors cannot be discounted as motivators for anthropologists to further engage the work of health and healing as these worked to understand other cultures and their needs. This retrospective also explores how the subdiscipline/specialization of medical anthropology became formalized, applied; and how critically important it became in contributing to medical knowledge and practice cross-culturally. Examples of modern-day giants of medical anthropology bring our attention forward and underscore their lasting contributions. The retrospective ends by encouraging Christian anthropologists to consider specializing in medical anthropology. For those in practice, it asks where they ‘abide’ today: where they can be located, given that there is no formal organization unique to them.