Dr. Ida

Most kids my age wouldn’t have found a lengthy biography of a medical missionary gripping summer reading. I wasn’t a particularly pious child, though my parents, who had spent years as missionaries in South India, made sure Jesus was a real presence in our daily lives–not just a subject of Sunday rituals. But I was a reader, and I loved stories.

Surprisingly early–I think I was about 12–my mother handed me a copy of Dorothy Clarke Wilson’s Dr. Ida after morning chores one Saturday, saying simply she thought I’d like it. Part of her wisdom was not to oversell what she hoped I might find edifying.

She had crossed paths briefly with Dr. Ida Scudder; the Advent Christian mission school at which my mother had worked for 13 years was not far from Vellore where Dr. Ida’s hospital and medical school had become a thriving center of care. I loved hearing Mom’s stories, and Dad’s, about running the mission “dispensary,” taking medical supplies out to villages, attending to the poor who came to their gates–including lepers, “outcasts,” and even, once, a farmer with a bullock whose abscess needed treatment.

So, I put the iron away, took the book, settled myself among some pillows, and began to read.

Like me, Dr. Ida was born into a lineage of pastors and missionaries. Hers extended back into the early nineteenth century in the Reformed Church in America and included 42 members of the Scudder family, most of them in medicine. Unlike mine, her parents stayed in India–a road not taken that made both my mother and me wistful from time to time. My mother would love to have stayed in India, and I believed, romantically, that I’d love to have grown up speaking Tamil to my nurse, Kirabai, watching monkeys swinging from trees in the garden, staying cool on warm days with cold coconut drinks and broad straw fans. These fancies were laced with images of my young self in a topee carrying bandages and bottles of pain-relieving medications into huts while pots of rice boiled over outdoor fires. My quixotic aspirations were later modified by a more mature awareness of the painful realities of missionary life with its exposure to exotic diseases, long separations, and arduous fund-raising, and of South Indian poverty, the entrenched cruelties of the caste system, and the cultural and political ambiguities of mission work. My mother smiled a little wryly at my youthful delusions. “Don’t become a missionary,” she said one day to my surprise, “unless there’s nothing else you can be happy doing.” Unless, she added, acknowledging her own clear and very youthful call, “God unmistakably calls you.”

God unmistakably did call Dr. Ida. Though she was determined not to follow her father and his seven siblings into RCA mission work, determined not to spend her life in “dirty, dusty” India, she found she could do nothing else after being present one night at the successive deaths of three women in childbirth whose husbands refused, for cultural and religious reasons, to allow male doctors to attend them. As she heard the funeral drums the morning after all three died, she prayed, “God, if You want me to, I will spend the rest of my life in India trying to help these women.”

She went to Cornell University’s Weill Medical college, returned to India as one of its first female graduates, and wasted no time establishing a school to train women in basic medicine, roadside dispensaries, and a small women’s clinic, a seedling project that eventually grew into Vellore Christian Medical Center, the largest Christian hospital in Asia.

The stirring words she spoke to donors as her projects took shape might serve as an epigraph to a long life of informed, imaginative service that reached far beyond individual goals: “First ponder, then dare. Know your facts. Count the cost. Money is not the important thing. What you are building is not a medical school. It is the Kingdom of God. Don’t err on the side of being too small.” Though she faced many challenges in the course of difficult collaborations with colleagues and misconceptions among supporters, she never erred in that particular way. Her words, rooted in unsentimental, abiding faith, remind me of C.S. Lewis’s observation that most of us disappoint God not by asking too much, but by asking too little.

None of this story of answered prayer and visionary work–the clinic, the hospital complex, and subsequent benchmarks in treating widespread cholera, leprosy, preventable blindness, maternal risks, and childhood diseases–happened without vigorous opposition by medical, governmental, and sometimes ecclesial bureaucracies befogged by unexamined misogyny and colonialism.

The specter of colonialism, of course, hangs over the history of mission work and retroactively casts suspicion on the motives of those who believed themselves to be called by God to spread the gospel to all people. Inevitably Western missionaries, even though they learned indigenous languages, spread literacy, and offered sanitation, health care, and education to those who had little access to any of those things, varied in their cultural sensitivity and did their share of “westernizing,” especially those who worked with children. They were who they were, sometimes parochial and provincial, sometimes condescending, sometimes doing harm. But intercultural contact changes people and can dispel simplistic myths, stereotypes and naivete.

Historian David Hollinger has made the best case I’ve come across for the mutuality of influence between American Christian missionaries and indigenous people in his 2017 book Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World, but Changed America. He challenges simplistic notions of missionaries as culturally insensitive, politically naive collaborators in imperialism. Certainly the history of mission schools like those in North America reinforces some of the horrifying truths behind the negative stereotypes. Hollinger, however, offers numerous examples of people who returned from working or growing up in foreign mission fields to enter public life more respectful of the cultures they inhabited, more informed, more linguistically competent, and more culturally attuned than less traveled colleagues. Some came home to participate in the civil rights movement, challenge racist laws, and move their own churches toward ecumenism and solidarity with those in the developing world. Some took formative roles in U.S. policies and popular thought, Henry Luce, Pearl Buck, and John Hersey among them.

Fully acknowledging the worst of what poorly informed “mission” work can wreak, it’s important to recognize what it has meant at its best: exchange of skills, gifts, and perspectives; more sophisticated understanding of how evangelism could become entangled with nationalism; heightened awareness of the tradeoffs translation always entails; a capacity for diplomacy that includes attention to customs and courtesies that may matter more than a passing visitor might realize. And access to schooling and health care: most church-sponsored mission work has focused on one or both as a specifically gospel-driven work. The now massive hospital complex at Vellore and the medical school Dr. Ida started has grown and branched in ways that have helped millions. It now occupies 11 sites and serves over 10,000 patients a day in over 150 departments.

One particularly painful dilemma arose for her early on in this enterprise when pressures to fund the medical school led her board to propose that it become coeducational, upon which many donors threatened to rescind funding unless it remained a training center exclusively for women. Certainly, medical neglect of women was her primary motivator: her clear call, which she described as “the first time I saw God face to face” had come after witnessing those three preventable maternal deaths. They signified a particular need in a culture in which not only caste but also gender consigned women to inferior treatment and early death. Was her calling, she had to wonder, specific to serving women? The resolution to the question didn’t come without earnest prayer and strenuous diplomacy. The doors of the medical school were finally opened to men in 1945, 27 years after its founding, but not without wrenching controversies and financial forfeitures.

The question “To whom shall I go?” arises for all of us who have felt called to service in particular places and times as those places and times open out into wider fields of possibility. Do we extend our efforts in new directions? Do we “go political”? Do we remain local? And now, to what extent do we allow and use social media to widen, and inevitably change, communities of shared faith and support?

In a sense, it was Dr. Ida who first raised for me the question of what “calling” might mean. The question remains. It comes up in new ways as professional opportunities arise or are foreclosed, as institutional crises demand moral decisions about how to align ourselves, as our spheres of influence and energies change with age and experience.

Dr. Ida died a few days after my 11th birthday, May 23, 1960, shortly before I began reading about her arduous, gritty, energetic life. For several years her story fueled my dream of becoming a medical missionary. Even after I didn’t become one (it turned out there were other things I could be happy doing) I found myself recalling her story often for what it taught me not only about vocation, but about the complexities of institutional life, from which Christian institutions are certainly not immune, and about the joy of service–the kind of joy I believe Wendell Berry recognized in a line that calls us directly into the paradoxes of life in a fallen world and in a crumbling empire: “Rejoice, though you have considered all the facts.” Dr. Ida did. A teacher who came into my life as a gift of grace, she still helps me remember that joy is often what grows in the soil of loss and disappointment, grows through the cracks like persistent grass, and grows best in the sunlight of radical humility.