Author: Francis John Halford

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0824884736

A doctor presents a lively account of nineteenth-century New Englanders who sailed upon a six-months voyage around the Horn as medical missionaries to the inhabitants of subtropical Hawaii. With them they took brides who had been strangers to them only weeks before. Stubbornly clinging to temperate-zone clothing, food, and traditions, these “parlor-raised Priscillas” faced mountainous household tasks. Meantime their husbands crossed treacherous channels and threaded perilous mountain trails to deliver missionary babies, to fight leprosy and smallpox, and to try to save the natives from the common cold and other newly introduced disease against which they had had no opportunity to build up a resistance. The resentment of sailors and whaling captains at introduction of the Decalogue, the distrust of kings and chiefs, the jealousy of native medical practitioners—these were some of the obstacles which beset the missionary doctors. Relying upon bleedings, blisterings, purges, and emetics, they practiced in a day when anesthetics, antisepsis, and abdominal surgery were unknown. Theirs was a record of gallant dedication in the face of almost insuperable odds. But this book is far more than a record of the hardships and triumphs of missionary physicians. It is an account of a critical era of rapid change within an island community struggling to survive the sudden impact of Western civilization. 9 Doctors and God is based largely upon the personal letters and private journals of the doctors and their wives—relatively obscure and highly fruitful sources of first-hand information. The result is a rare combination of scholarly research and spirited presentation—a splendid contribution to the annals of an eventful period of transition in Hawaii and America.