When I examined the architecture of the Peshawar hospital in the previous chapter, I mentioned that it consisted of a caravanserai for traveller patients – patients who travelled from other cities – and their family and friends. This chapter, the focus of which is on hospital visiting, returns to this architectural configuration. A focus on visitors and visiting is beneficial to understanding the distinct nature of mission hospitals, as it can reveal much about the relationship between the institutions and the communities they served. In their edited collection on hospital visiting, Graham Mooney and Jonathan Reinarz assert that ‘visiting involved the comings and goings not only of relatives and friends, but also of administrators, managers, philanthropists, lay care-givers, priests and ministers, entertainers, and tourists’. Mission hospitals also received visitors from various groups. This chapter identifies these groups, focusing ultimately on patients’ visitors, namely family and friends. Protestant missionaries of various denominations allowed family and friends to visit and even live in the hospitals in Persia, British India, China, the Persian Gulf region, Uganda and Nigeria. The chapter examines who family and friends were, what they did and discusses the reasons that counted for their presence. Additionally, it demonstrates that the presence of family members had an architectural manifestation; that is, the missionaries developed a specific building to host a ‘whole family’ in a hospital. In so doing, the chapter identifies a new hospital type developed at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Mooney and Reinarz find it surprising ‘how little has been revealed about the historical evolution of this seemingly universal practice’. Reinarz further states that ‘the history of hospital visiting has been a strangely neglected theme in the history of medicine’. More than ten years after the publication of their volume, hospital visiting is still a relatively marginalised topic. There is an even greater shortage of research on hospital visiting beyond the European and North American contexts. Only a few scholars have explored the specificities of the boundaries between asylums (or hospitals for the insane) and the extra-institutional world in Australasian Colonial World and South Asia.