'It is well with the child': Changing Views on Protestant Missionary Children's Health, 1870s–1930s. (June 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Morrison, Hugh
• Editors: Methuen, Charlotte; Spicer, Andrew
• Is Part Of: Studies in church history. Volume 58(2022)
• Page Start: 306
• Page End: 329
• Publication Date: 2022-06
• Subjects: 270
• DOI: 10.1017/stc.2022.15
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0424-2084

Abstract

Abstract : Esme Cleall observes that for nineteenth-century British missionary families ill-health was constructed as being 'reflexive of and contributory to a specifically missionary identity'. This article argues that while this was a persistent theme, a new and significantly different discourse emerged emphasizing missionary families' health. Children were central to this discursive shift. The article focuses on missionary children's health, using selected Anglo-American cases. There was an uneasy overlap of religiously motivated rhetoric that still expected illness and death to be part of missionary childhood experience, and a professionalized discourse that redefined missionary families as sites of health and well-being. This culminated in medical and academic literature within religious and missionary circles that constructed missionaries' children as a new category. Thus churches responded both to the development of the medical profession and to the development of modern child-centred thinking and practices, in the process developing a new missiological or theological response to childhood.