Medical mission usa
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Mary Bird (medical missionary)
Mary Rebecca Stewart Bird (1859–1914) was a Church Mission Society (CMS) missionary who pioneered Christian ministry to Iranian women and women's medical missions in the CMS.
Although she had received no official medical training, Bird was the first female medical missionary to be employed by the CMS. Born in a weakened state, Bird died in 1914 at the age of fifty-five leaving behind a vibrant medical ministry in Iran.
Family
Mary Bird was born into a family filled with Christian bishops, clergy, politicians, travellers, explorers, and philanthropists. Mary Bird's father—Charles Robinson Bird (1819–1886)—was the rector of the English village Castle Eden, her grandfather—Robert Merttins Bird (1788–1853)—was the head of the Revenue Department of the North West Provinces of India, and Isabella Bird—the intrepid woman traveller, writer, and explorer—was the cousin of Mary Bird's father. William Wilberforce (1759–1833), John Bird Sumner (1780–1862), Archbishop of Canterbury, and his brother Charles Richard Sumner (1790–1874), Bishop of W
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Scudder, Ida Sophia (1870-1960)
Medical missionary in India
Born in India, Scudder was a granddaughter of the first American medical missionary, Dr. John Scudder, who with his seven sons all became missionaries. Graduating from Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts, she returned to visit her parents in India, determined never to become one of “those missionary Scudders.” Here in 1894 she received her call, that famous “three knocks in the night,” when three young women died in childbirth because there had been no woman doctor to treat them. Graduating from Cornell University Medical School in the first class open to women, for two years she treated woman patients in her father’s bungalow in Vellore, South India; then in 1902 she moved into Schell Hospital, built with money she herself raised in America. She performed her first operation with no helper but the butler’s wife, yet in time she became noted as a surgeon. By 1906 the number of patients she treated annually had risen to 40,000.
Scudder began training nurses, an almost unheard-of pr
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Dr. Carl K. Becker – Africa’s Greatest Medical Missionary
Africa has been blessed with a long line of outstanding Christian medical missionaries. Such remarkable individuals as David Livingstone, Albert Schweitzer and Helen Roseveare come readily to mind. “But if one medical missionary to Africa were to be singled out,” states missiologist Ruth Tucker, “for his length of service combined with his extraordinary dedication to saving the lives and improving the health standards of the African people, it would surely be Carl Becker, the great munganga [doctor] of the Congo.”
Carl Becker (1894-1990) was born and raised in Manheim, Pennsylvania. After receiving his medical training at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, he successfully practiced medicine in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, for seven years. In 1929 Becker and his wife, Marie, left Boyertown to go to the Belgian Congo (modern Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the Africa Inland Mission. In doing so, Becker exchanged an annual income of $10,000-plus for a missionary’s salary of $720 per year.
Five years lat
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