Page 323 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

309.

T.R. Colledge; Parker and Bridgman served as vice-presidents.

Merchants filled the other offices of the Society. With the

other philanthropic societies at Canton, this Society hoped to

aid missionary work in China. But the Medical Missionary

Society emphasized the medical aspects of Parker's Hospital
36
much more than the religious. Strongly supported by the mer­

chants at Canton, the Society attracted seven doctors to China

37
by 1844. All of these were Americans, two of whom were
ordained ministers. The Society also began to receive donations

from individuals in the United States.

Overall, both the Morrison Education Society and the

Medical Missionary Society produced valuable assistance to the

secular, philanthropic facets of missionary efforts in China.
The benefit of these societies in terms of religious conversion

was questionable. Yet the missionaries, especially the Americans,

continued to emphasize the importance of the societies to their

work. This view reflected the strong strain of a reform spirit
38
in the American missionary movement. Concern for the heathen

36
The missionaries also hoped to awaken Chinese interest in
science through medicine. Danton, Culture Contacts of the United
States and China, p. 49. Reports on the annual progress of this
Society were published in the Chinese Repository, VII, 1 (May 1838),
32-36; VII, 9 (January 1839), 469-69; X, 8 (August 1841), 448-49.
See also Williams, Middle Kingdom, II, 335-37.
3 7 ' ' ,
T h ' i s cone 1 usion is Dase on th e C J_nese Reposi ory s cen-
' t
h .
d
I
sus reports of foreign residents in China. No English doctors or
medical missionaries appear in censuses of 1841-45. X, l(January,
1841), 58-60; XI, l(January 1842), 55-58; XII, l(January 1843),
14-17; XIII, l(January 1844), 3-7; XIV, l(January 1845), 3-9.
38
Barnett, in "Americans as Humanitarians," pp. 13-34,
discusses the origins of the reform spirit in American mission­
aries attitudes by discussing their writings. Barnett attributes
the whole American foreign missionary movement to this reform
spirit, which arose out of the religious revivalism that appeared
in New England in the nineteenth century.