Clara Swain, the doctor with a mission in India

Posted in Historical articles, Medicine, Missionaries on Tuesday, 8 November 2011

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This edited article about missionaries originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 856 published on 10 June 1978.

Hindu children, picture, image, illustration

Hindoo children playing games

India! In all the years that she had spent studying to become a doctor, Clara Swain had never dreamed that she might end up practising medicine in that over-populated sub-continent of Asia.

But now she had qualified and had received a letter from a Mrs Thomas who ran a girls’ orphanage with her husband in Bareilly, North-West India. Mrs Thomas had written to say that they were desperately in need of a woman doctor. In India, local and religious customs demanded that thousands of women lived lives of seclusion in which they were not allowed to speak to any men other than their relations. If they were ill, treatment by a male doctor was out of the question.

Clara made her mind up immediately: she would go.

Clara Swain was born in 1834 in Castile, near New York, in the United States. From the age of 15, she had supported herself by teaching while continuing to study. From 1865 she trained under Cornelia A. Greene, one of the first women doctors. In the middle of 1869, just as Clara qualified as a doctor, Mrs Thomas’s letter arrived. By January the following year, Clara was in India.

In her letters, she describes her impressions on reaching the missionary settlement.

“The two mission houses and grounds are very pretty and pleasant. The houses are one storey high, built chiefly of sun-dried bricks, plastered over and whitewashed. They have wide verandahs . . .”

As families in Bareilly heard of the new woman doctor, Clara found she was working harder. Soon the medical work had increased to a point where the mission could hardly cope. They needed a hospital.

Clara and Mr and Mrs Thomas therefore travelled 60 kilometres by carriage to Rampore to ask the Nawab of the province to sell them land on which to build a hospital. When they arrived, they were told that the Nawab was engaged in prayer, and that they would have to wait a day before they could see him. However, to keep them amused, he sent two music boxes as entertainment, plus a strong man who could lift a camel, a man who could walk a tight-rope, and a company of actors.

The following day they were ushered into the Nawab’s presence. After some preliminary small talk, Mr. Thomas explained the purpose of their visit, saying that he wished to buy the estate adjoining the mission for the purpose of establishing a hospital.

They were amazed to hear the Nawab say that they could have the land free of charge.

On the land, 16 hectares of it, they immediately set about building a hospital, following Indian ideas as far as possible, so that the Indian women patients would feel able to cook and live just as they did at home. Although the hospital provided shelter and medical care, the patients and their families handled all the living arrangements.

Patients soon began coming to the hospital: Hindus, Muslims and Christians, all with their separate apartments. A poor patient would bring her children, and perhaps her mother-in-law or widowed sister; high caste patients might bring their families and several servants, and maybe even a yoke of oxen, a horse and carriage.

By 1876, Clara had taken on the responsibility for 2,000 patients and the dispensary was giving out over 5,000 prescriptions a year. She was heavily overworked, sometimes to the point at which her own health suffered, but the hospital itself was running well.

After a long break, back in the United States to regain her health, Clara returned to Bareilly. Almost immediately, however, she was asked to become palace physician to the wife of the Rajah of Khetri. Clara felt the hospital she had founded would continue to be run without her and so she took the new job.

For ten years, until the mid-1890’s, she had her own house near the palace and a dispensary where she could treat women patients and teach them about the Bible.

Clara died in 1910, but the hospital in Bareilly still continues its work, following the aims that Clara set out: heal the sick and preach the Gospel!

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