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Childbirth and Emerging Missionary Information Networks in Britain and the South Pacific

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2022

KATE TILSON
KATE TILSON*
Affiliation:
Murray Edwards College, Cambridge CB2 0DF;
*
E-mail: kejt2@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article explores how childbirth shaped the information networks that London Missionary Society missionaries helped develop between Britain and the South Pacific from the late eighteenth century. As Evangelical missionaries experienced challenging births in the South Pacific, they sought new forms of cultural knowledge, which they recorded in their reports to the society. Part of these knowledge networks included books on medicine and midwifery that the missionaries ordered from Britain. From the 1820s, moreover, some missionaries came to collate early forms of ethnographical and anthropological research on Pacific peoples, which examined indigenous ways of birth and postnatal care.

Type
World Christianities Prize Essay
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 74 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 305 - 324
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2022

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Footnotes

I would like thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments, Caitlin Adams and Thomas Goodwin for providing feedback and encouragement and David Maxwell for his support and advice. This work was funded by the University of Cambridge Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme.

References

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12 See, for example, Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (eds), Family and gender in the Pacific: domestic contradictions and the colonial impact, Cambridge 1989; Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly (eds), Divine domesticities: Christian paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific, Canberra 2014. See also the special issue, Esme Cleall, Ishiguro Laura and Emily Manktelow, ‘Imperial relations: histories of family in the British Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History xiv (2013), unpaginated.

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20 See, for example, Isabel Hofmeyr, The portable Bunyan: a transnational history of the Pilgrim's Progress, Princeton 2004, and Stephanie Newell, Emma Hunter and Derek R. Peterson (eds), African print cultures: newspapers and their publics in the twentieth century, Ann Arbor, Mi 2016.

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24 See Patrick Harries, Butterflies and barbarians: Swiss missionaries and systems of knowledge in South-East Africa, Oxford 2007; John Stenhouse, ‘Missionary science’, in David N. Livingstone, Hugh Richard Slotten and Ronald L. Numbers (eds), The Cambridge history of science, viii, Cambridge 2020, 90–107.

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32 M. Orsmond to LMS, 28 Nov. 1817.

33 Fitzgerald, ‘Archives of memory’, 669.

34 Henry Bicknell and Mary Bicknell to Thomas Haweis, 1818, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 2, at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2713966460.

35 Rowland Hassall as quoted in Manktelow, Missionary families, 133.

36 William Harbutt to LMS, 16 Mar. 1842, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 5, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2714778825.

37 Ibid.

38 Ebenezer Buchanan to LMS, 26 Oct. 1839, ACJP, SOAS, SSL, box 12, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2714376586.

39 John Orsmond to LMS, 20 Aug. 1817, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 2, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2714017565.

40 Idem to LMS, 1 Dec. 1817, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 2, at nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2714019252.

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43 Idem, journal, entry for 16 Sept. 1817, AJCP, SOAS, SSJ, box 4, at 2712638838.

44 Idem, journal, entry for 1 Dec. 1817, ibid.

45 Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (Dec. 1818).

46 Elbourne, ‘Mother's milk’, 22.

47 Johannes Fabian, Out of our minds: reason and madness in the exploration of Central Africa, Berkeley, Ca 2000, 8.

48 For example, Frances Porter, ‘All that the heart does bear: a reflection on the domestic life of missionary wives’, in Robert Glen (ed.), Mission and moko: aspects of the work of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand, 1814–1882, Christchurch 1992, 135–51, and Manktelow, Missionary families.

49 M. Orsmond to LMS, 28 Nov. 1817.

50 J. Orsmond to LMS, 20 Aug. 1817.

51 Idem, to LMS, 1 Dec. 1817.

52 Manktelow, Missionary families, 136.

53 William Henry journal, entry for 1797, AJCP, SOAS, SSJ, box 1, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2712714227.

54 Hassall journal, entry for 31 Jan. 1798, ACJP, SOAS, SSJ, box 1, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2712711036.

55 Thomas Blossom to LMS, 28 Oct. 1833, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 9, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2714562366.

56 Buchanan to LMS, 26 Oct. 1839.

57 Charles Green to LMS, 10 June 1839, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 12, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-271427017.

58 Charles Hardie to LMS, 6 Apr. 1837, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 11, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2715048527.

59 William Miles to LMS, 8 May 1837, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 11, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2715051519.

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63 Periodicals like the Evangelical Magazine and Eclectic Review reviewed medical publications. In 1833, for instance, the Eclectic Review (Jan.–June 1933) noted that part ii of the previously mentioned Copland's Dictionary of practical medicine was in press.

64 Niel Gunson, Messengers of grace: Evangelical missionaries in the South Seas, 1797–1860, Melbourne 1978, 249.

65 Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (Sept. 1828), 420.

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68 Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the nation: sex, science, and the conception of eighteenth-century Britons, Oxford 2005, 153.

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72 Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (eds), The making of the modern body: sexuality and society in the nineteenth century, Berkeley, Ca 1987.

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74 Thomas John Graham, On the diseases peculiar to females, London 1834, p. v.

75 M. Orsmond to LMS, 28 Nov. 1817.

76 Jane Samson, Race and redemption: British missionaries encounter Pacific peoples, 1797–1920, Grand Rapids, Mi 2017, 72–3.

77 Ballantyne, Entanglements of empire.

78 Ibid. 5.

79 Ellis, Polynesian researches, i. 347.

80 Henry journal, entry for [?] 1797, AJCP, SOAS, SSJ, box 1, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2712714546.

81 Manktelow, Missionary families, 137.

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84 James Hayward to LMS, 1819, AJCP, SOAS, SSL, box 5, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2714059308.

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89 Hassall journal, entry for 26 Oct. 1797, AJCP, SOAS, SSJ, box 1, at https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2712710452.

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