Page 18 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

6

and cheerfully complied with by the Arab patients,Even

more surprisingly, the women missionaries who now came out

to act as nurses or doctors or to join their husbands in the

field also won quick acceptance, both as doctors and confid­

ants in a society where women were normally expected to lead

a highly cloistered life,'1'®

Q By 1902, Dr, Thoms reported that the success of the medi­

cal program had established for the Mission a position of trust

and respect, even in suspicious and inhospitable Basrah, Erom

1900 to 1902 over seven thousand patients had been treated and

IQ
forty-one operations performed under anaesthetic, 5 "Prejudice

is rapidly melting away," Dr, Thoms wrote of the ’Iraq statioh

"and the sheikhs themselves are beginning to consider it quite
n 20
the thing to be treated by the Mission doctor, With the

medical work serving as a spearhead, the Arabian Mission was

rs able to expand, and soon established itself in Muscat (1893),

Araarah (1911) and finally Kuwait (1911).

The cornerstone laying for the lansing Memorial Hospital

at Basrah in 1910 was a particularly proud moment for those

missionaries who could recall the station’s inauspicious be­

ginnings just nineteen years previously, when the Wall had

ordered the missionaries to leave. In the Mission’s quarterly

report, Reverend G.J. Pennings wrote enthusiastically of the

several hundred notables present, including the acting Nakib,

the majjaSE- of the town, the mullahs, teachers, government of­

ficials and powerful landowners: