Toward a Typology of Missionary Medicine: A Comparison of Three Canadian Medical Missions in China before 1937
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until the Communist domination in 1949, medical missionaries had been the chief source of modern health care in China. While there is now a small but growing body of literature on medical missionaries and their work in China, studies in this area have treated missionary medicine as a homogeneous type of health care. This is a simplistic view of missionary medicine, as medical work organized by Christian missions has exhibited a variety of forms in Chinese society. The purpose of this paper is to offer a typology of missionary medicine, which will provide a useful framework for further research in this area. Medical missionary activities fell into three main dimensions, ranging from hospital and dispensary services, or “primary” medical work, to medical education and public health, or “secondary” medical work. While primary medical work was the sine qua non of every mission, the amount of medical resources allocated to secondary medical work varied tremendously among the missions. By using the concepts of “local” and “cosmopolitan,” two types of missionary medicine can be distinguished on the basis of the amount of secondary medical work carried out by a mission. Local medical missions devoted most resources to primary work, making few secondary efforts, whereas cosmopolitan medical missions allocated substantial resources to secondary work apart from maintaining primary work. The medical work of three Canadian missions in China from the turn of the twentieth century to 1937 will be used to illustrate the local-cosmopolitan typology. Also, the utility and implications of the typology for the study of health care in China will be discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".