Medicine and Mission

Robert Colledge, MA 1972

This well-illustrated, engaging and wittily written biography of Thomas Richardson Colledge, a nineteenth Century pioneering doctor, tells of his upbringing in Northamptonshire and education at Rugby School, and his medical training in Leicester Royal Infirmary and St Thomas’s Hospital Southwark.

He then joined the East India Company and served as a ship’s surgeon for several years before being appointed the Company’s Surgeon at the British Factory in Canton (modern Guangzhou), China. Here he founded an ophthalmic hospital and achieved phenomenal success by his treatment of indigenous Chinese patients, while at the same time enjoying an enjoyably full social life in the Portuguese Colony of Macau, where among the expatriate community he met a beautiful American whom he married in 1833.

He founded the Medical Missionary Society in 1835 to great international acclaim. After twenty years’ practice in China, he returned to Britain in 1838 where he obtained advanced medical qualifications in Scotland, later taking up a highly successful private practice in Cheltenham, where he lived with his wife and family until his death in 1889.

Medicine and Mission is a biography of Thomas Richardson Colledge, a nineteenth Century English pioneering ophthalmic surgeon, - it covers the following topics: Social history of early 19th century England including the British 'Public School' system; and life in Salem, New England.

Medical training and practice in England at this period The East India Company and British imperial history in the Far East China and its relations with the West leading up to the Opium War(s).

It is not a work aimed at specialist readership but would be of general interest to scholars and students of e.g. China in the early 19th Century, students of medical training during this period, and students of the role of women at the turn of the 18th/19th century. It would also be of considerable interest to students of Christian missionary work of this era. Its style is intended to reach a wide audience being at times light hearted where appropriate; and with even-handed treatment of contentious issues such as zealous Christian missionary work, and the questionable ethos of the East India Company.

ISBN: 978-1-912078-48-6