Medical Missionaries and the Invention of the “Serai Hospital” in North-western British India

Abstract

This article sets out to challenge the assumption that the pavilion plan hospital became an international standard by the late nineteenth century. This assumption is based on evidence of just a few, mainly British, state and military hospitals. Hospitals constructed by non-British European empires and those by North Americans in the colonised world have been excluded. Moreover, indigenous people in many parts of colonial territories encountered so-called Western biomedical services for the first time in Protestant mission hospitals rather than in state or military hospitals. The article examines several case hospitals built by the Church Missionary Society (cms) in north-western British India and offers a framework for analysing the architecture of Protestant mission hospitals that goes “beyond” a postcolonial approach. Drawing on conceptual tools offered by the field of the history of emotions, the article argues that the missionaries remade the pavilion plan and invented a new form, namely the Serai hospital, to gain local people’s “trust” and “affection”. This strategy was less about “pacifying” the patients and more about increasing their numbers. Indeed, medical missions were “emotional set-ups” that served to change the sensory relationship between missionaries and local people.