spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

and the scientific nature of Western medicine. By disengaging these two dimensions of
missionary medicine, its claim of superiority was robbed of its power while Christian notions
were still attached to this form of medicine.
In the discourse about missionary medicine, the rejection of its supremacy resulted from a
critical examination of the notion of transformation. The history of medical missions
demonstrates that those ideological elements have been intermingled from the inception of
missionary medicine. Recent studies show that the recipients of missionary medicine dealt in
their own way with the issue of superiority and transformation. The idea of medicine’s
supremacy was dismissed due to its ‘incomprehensible’ scientific approach, but Christian
medicine was accepted among other healing systems in Africa due to its special link with
religion. In the end it can be concluded that what made missionary medicine into a unique entity
was its focus on spiritual, physical, social and cultural transformation, and not its presumed
supremacy.
3.6 CONCLUSIONS
The discourse on missionary medicine can and should be treated as a separate and independent
field within the medicine discourse. The inception history of medical missions as well as the
specific nature of missionary medicine reveal that missionary medicine is not the same as, for
example, colonial medicine or other configurations of European biomedicine. The full discourse
on missionary medicine came into being as an ancillary branch of the modern missionary
movement. Medical missions were designed to support evangelism by supplementing the extent
of the missionary influence with ‘caring and curing’ activities. Missionary medicine was a form
of medicine, but it was molded according to its purpose. In other words, the theory,
implementation, praxis and effects of missionary medicine differ from other forms of medicine
so fundamentally that is it possible to conclude that missionary medicine constitutes its own
discourse.
Missionary medicine was characterized as evangelical or Christian medicine, because its medical
format was heavily influenced by Christian notions. The influence of these Christian ideas and
beliefs resulted in illness etiologies founded on a clear and strong link between disease and sin.
One's illness was interpreted as a clear sign of one’s sin. Besides the religious interpretation of
illness, the therapeutic methods used by medical missionaries were heavily influenced by
Christian faith: the treatment of the African patient was determined by the idea that the body was
the site for spiritual outcomes. So the struggle for transformation was projected on the body of
the African patient.
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