Is the Medical Missionary Obsolete?: Survey of the Changing Landscape of Scholarship on Christian Mission in India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In this article I discuss the scholarship on Protestant medical missionaries within Indian Christianity. I argue medical missionaries occupy a distinctive space within mission studies and wider histories relating to the medically pluralistic landscape of contemporary India. This review engages with the development of the field and the recent resurgence in interest toward the role of female medical missionaries in India. It examines how missionary engagement shapes how certain categories are understood and reified, such as the binary of biomedicine and traditional medicine, and the roles of women doctors and indigenous midwives. Finally, I raise the question of who can and has been considered a medical missionary. I contend that the hesitance to name Indian Christians as medical missionaries stems from not only a discomfort with the category of “missionary” at large but also from a historical tendency in missions to reserve the title for white missionaries. The issue of naming must reckon with scholarly power dynamics as well as the difficult questions that arise when acknowledging Indian Christians who identify as contemporary medical missionaries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".