In 2011, I visited the Morsalīn hospital in Kerman (southern Persia) for the first time. I intended to work on the revitalisation plan of a historic hospital, and I was advised to focus on this particular hospital – I was told that the Morsalīn hospital was the first contemporary hospital of Kerman. I was born, grew up, and studied architecture in Kerman, yet I was not aware of this hospital, and my advisor had failed to mention that it was established and built by British missionaries. On my first visit, the hospital did not appear to me to be British at all, or foreign for that matter I felt that I was in a familiar place. I only learned that the hospital was built by British missionaries after my third visit; approaching the main entrance of the hospital (which is now closed) I noticed the sign at the top of the entrance, which reads ‘CMS Hospitals’ (Figure I.1). Upon further reading, I realised that the CMS stands for the Church Missionary Society (CMS), which built more than seventy hospitals in Asia and Africa between 1865 and 1939. The first impression that the buildings of the Kerman hospital left with me did not diminish in time, and ultimately it informed the direction of my project – I constantly asked myself how patients felt when visiting the hospitals or, to use Sara Ahmed’s words, how the hospital impressed patients and impressed upon patients.

In 1864 Reverend Robert Clark, a CMS missionary in Punjab, and his wife, Elizabeth Mary Browne, visited Kashmir to find an ‘opening’ for evangelistic work. They were greeted with ‘opposition’ by the officials of the Maharajah and by ‘the masses’ who showed ‘Mr. and Mrs. Clark that neither they nor their religion was welcome in Kashmir’. Despite these obstacles, Mrs Clark opened a dispensary that ‘was largely attended’, and this signified the need for a medical mission. Subsequently, the CMS Committee passed a resolution, and Dr William Jackson Elmslie, a medical graduate of the University of Edinburgh, was appointed to Kashmir to start a medical mission. On 9 May 1865, Elmslie wrote, ‘to-day is memorable in the history of the Kashmir Medical Mission from the fact that I opened my dispensary this morning.’