This statement, made by Dr Arthur Lankester of the Peshawar medical mission in 1900, suggests that medical missions were established in a step-by-step manner. First, the missionaries opened outpatient dispensaries, after which they started inpatient departments. Dr Urania Latham (Mrs Napier Malcolm) of the Yazd medical mission echoed this statement in her book, Children of Persia, in 1911; she asserted, ‘[a]s a rule a dispensary is started first, to which out-patients can come to get medicine and have their hurts attended to. Later a hospital is opened.’ Lankester and Latham’s statements are comparable to John Barton’s, the CMS’s secretary in British India, in 1874:

The CMS advocated modesty in architecture throughout the nineteenth century. But Lankester and Latham’s use of the term ‘as a rule’ was more complex than it might seem at first sight. They did not necessarily refer to the CMS’s principles; rather, they pointed to the specificities of medical mission work, particularly in British India, China and the Middle East. Not only the CMS medical missions, but also medical missions of the ABCFM, the London Missionary Society (LMS), the SPG, the Christian Missions in Many Lands (CMML) and the German-based Sudan Pionier Mission (SPM), to name but a few, were started as small outpatient dispensaries, followed by an inpatient department in rented buildings and, after several years, a purposebuilt structure.