THE FOUR MISSION HOSPITALS
3. Challenges to the Existence of the Hospitals
3.2. The Introduction of Doctors in Hospitals
3.2.1. The Training of the Mission Doctors
The doctors who made a major impact on three out of the four hospitals under review did not begin their medical training with the intention of becoming medical missionaries. Magdalene Schiele of the Berlin Mission Station happened to fall in love and married Benhard, a seminarian designated for the mission field. Ulrich Schmid of the Hermannsburg Mission, while studying medicine at Pretoria University, had contacts with missionary Dehnke of nearby Hebron, but ended up being called from the then South West Africa. Bergter of the Mission of Evangelical Free Churches on the other hand, came to the mission field having already returned to Germany after working for years for a private company operating in India. The Norwegian Mission Society did not send a doctor to Untunjambili until the late 1970s.
Since there was no special training institution for them, the mission doctors received the same training as ordinary doctors. In light of the previous paragraph, the mission doctors often chose to go into the mission field after or during their training.
However, in preparation for the work in Africa some mission doctors together with
other doctors had to undergo post-graduate studies in tropical medicine at the Deutsches Institut für ärztliche Mission in Tübingen.
Earlier, in Chapter Three I have shown that the Western concepts of healing differed from the indigenous and the Zionist ones.120 In the 1930s, which was around the time when mission hospitals were established in Southern Africa, training for doctors had advanced tremendously.
With the discovery of penicillin and other drugs in the 1930s, medical science regarded itself as a discipline which existed to solve the problems that the people brought. Often when one goes in for a consultation, one hears doctors asking, “What is the problem today?” The unmentioned intention of the doctor and the unmentioned expectation of the patient is that whatever your problem is, the doctor can solve. This sort of training and mentality, according to Ian Kennedy in The Unmasking of Medicine, is problematic in the sense that doctors start to look for problems efficiently, and “the more they find and the more problem-solvers we need.”121 I want to agree with Kennedy that doctors are trained to see themselves as problem-solvers.
Unlike diviners, doctors do not care about looking for social and spiritual causes of problems but based on their knowledge they seek the proper medication to deal with the specific illnesses presented to them. Doctors’ training made them special in the sense that people depended on them as problem-solvers, even on matters unrelated to medicine. On his return to Germany, Bergter, in an interview said that he was frustrated by the German people who indulged in food and drink and then came to him for help.122 He was unaware that his training made him to be perceived and used by the people as a problem-solver. Obviously, doctors’ methods of solving problems would need the technology they were exposed to in academic hospitals during their training.
Besides the problem-solver mentality, doctors in general and medical doctors in particular possess training that gives them power over the hospital staff and the
120 They tried to heal the whole being in relation to his/her social relations.
121 Ian Kennedy, The Unmasking of Medicine. Allen & Unwin: Sydney, 1981, pp. 29-31.
patients. This was to be expected since the hospitals they came to work in were smaller versions of those in Germany. The first inclination was to make the mission hospitals operate in the same manner as those in Germany, or at least strive for that goal. Here one thinks of the doctor in a white coat, towering above all in the hospital and giving instructions as he walks along the corridors, in the gardens and in the wards. His exclusive knowledge made him powerful indeed.
Although undoubtedly powerful and influential regarding how the hospital was to operate, doctors had limitations in their training. The acute limitation was the inability to speak the local language. While there were missionaries and other doctors who managed to learn and master the local languages of their patients, many had inadequacies in communicating with their patients. The powerful missionary doctors and nurses became dependent upon the people whose health they wanted to restore.
The lack of communication rendered the medical missionaries powerless, as Antjie Krog, a White journalist learnt during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and when she and her co-authors tried to analyse a certain Mrs Konile’s testimony:
For the first time I, as a white South African, could access some of the deepest thoughts, traumatizing events and personal experiences of black South Africans in their own words – people could express themselves fully. Frantz Fanon said, ‘Mastery of language affords remarkable power’. But listening now to this Mrs Konile, I am left with a feeling that no, I am not like her! Even more serious, I don’t want to share a country with this kind of ‘blackness’. To tell you the truth, there is a kind of callousness, a non-logic, a superstitious senseless world in her testimony that I really want to flee from.123
In the mission hospitals the intervention of nurses who were bilingual was largely indispensable.124 In order to further reduce the gap of communication, booklets were prepared to help doctors to learn in the local languages the different parts of the body and their related ailments. 125 Such books were necessary as doctors cure the body parts rather than heal the whole person, as already mentioned above.
123 Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele, There was this goat: Investigating the truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile. University of KwaZulu-Natal Press:
Pietermaritzburg, 2009, p.21.
124 Nukuna of Emmaus and Lekgetho of Botshabelo.
125 A.M. Merriweather, English – Setswana Medical Phrasebook and Dictionary. Bechuanaland Book Centre: Lobatsi, 1964; G.D. Campbell and Harry Lugg, A Handbook to aid in the Treatment of Zulu
Apart from Schmidt who trained at the University of Pretoria, the two other doctors mentioned were trained in Europe. It is possible that the developments of medicine and science in Europe and the perception of Africans by Europeans had an impact on why these doctors became interested in using scientific discoveries in the mission field. The Europe of the 1930s-1940s had discovered penicillin.