Research project (M.A.B.S.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 1984. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-74).

Traveling teams of cardiovascular specialists visit poor countries to treat children born with life-threatening heart defects. Working within challenging settings, volunteers may need to build temporary operating theaters and neonatal intensive care units before beginning their work. They also try to extend their humanitarian reach beyond the confines of an in-country visit: they train locally-based personnel in surgical and critical care techniques considered routine in rich countries yet locally unavailable; they donate machines, hardware, and disposable materials to local hospitals; they even build permanent surgical centers. Pediatric heart surgery missions thus define a new context where medical technologies circulate globally. It is well-known that medical technologies have far-reaching effects, transforming societies while at the same time being transformed by them, but few scholars have explored these processes in medical humanitarian arenas. This study investigates the moral logic, medical logistics, and unanticipated effects of short-term surgical missions. The setting is Honduras: a known hub of medical mission activity. The study begins with an examination of why Honduras attracts scores of medical missions, and why children with heart defects have emerged as central objects of humanitarian concern. I argue that humanitarian sentiments dovetail with other interests and desires on the part of surgical volunteers, such as adventure travel, learning, and the allure of practicing an alternative, low-tech version of biomedicine as a corrective to disappointments, frustrations, and lulls in their everyday professional lives. I then describe how this humanitarian ethos reconfigures biomedical practice. This is followed by a discussion of the implications of pediatric heart surgery missions for host countries, such as how they inadvertently re-inscribe social hierarchies and place strain on existing health services. Finally, I follow the lives of pediatric heart patients after their surgeries, show how their parents contest any stereotypical assumptions about humanitarian aid beneficiaries, and unpack the logic underpinning consent for especially high-risk procedures. My analysis emerges from 13 months of ethnographic field research primarily in Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital, during which I participated in six pediatric heart surgery missions, and observed and interviewed volunteer clinicians, locally-based clinicians, and the parents of pediatric heart surgery patients.

As China was recovering from disease, starvation, and death that resulted from the authoritarian policies of the Great Leap Forward, Chinese officials looked outwards to “heal” Africa. From 1963, a steady trickle of Chinese doctors and nurses arrived in Algeria, providing health care for rural and suburban communities, before expanding their care throughout the continent of Africa. This dissertation explores the experiences of the medical mission workers in Algeria during the first two decades of China’s medical aid program. It documents the rise of a globalizing China in the post-colonial world through the highly significant, yet heretofore overlooked, medical and humanitarian networks between Chinese provincial health institutions and Algerian medical facilities. It shows that the exchange of medical technology, drugs, and practices between China and Algeria crossed not only physical borders, but also boundaries between different systems of medicine and visions of development. Amidst the geopolitics of the Cold War, Chinese medical aid formed an alternative model of postcolonial international health care intervention in Third World countries. Central to this model was what I call “Chinese socialist medicine,” a body of hybrid medical knowledge and socialized health care delivery. Chinese socialist medicine not only challenged medical elitism by devising new, egalitarian approaches and ethical models, but also heavily relied on improvised medical technology and “scientized” acupuncture, which crossed epistemological boundaries between Western and Chinese medicines. Using a combination of Chinese, Arabic, and French textual and video sources, oral interviews, and clinical observations, this study analyzes the mobilization of human resources to Algeria, the application of mixed technologies of biomedicine and Chinese medicine, efforts to build medical supply infrastructure to manage local health problems, and China’s ambitions to transplant Chinese socialist healthcare ethics and ideals to Algerian communities. During this process, China’s socialist medicine emerged as a hybrid and flexible product of Maoist ideals for social welfare and internationalism. It constantly redrew its boundaries in Algeria by competing with medical missions from other socialist countries and recruiting local health actors to its enterprise. The dissertation argues that China’s medical aid in the form of socialist medicine was a channel for the projection of China’s soft power in global health governance. It demonstrates that medicine and internationalism were integral to China’s political history in the Mao period. Mao’s China was hardly “xenophobic” or inwardly focused, but rather tangibly connected with the rest of the world by flows of people, ideas, materials, and technologies. Socialist China during this era was in fact committed to building its global presence through networks of soft power, including humanitarian aid and medicine. Resting at the intersection of Cold War politics, the history of medicine, and global humanitarianism, the dissertation shows that China’s medical missions served as an ideological and methodological alternative in postcolonial health management within the global South.

Thesis (M. A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1997. / Bibliography: leaves 182-188.

"November 2003" / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 276-306) / xiii, 306 leaves : ill., planes, plates (some col.) ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Asian Studies and Dept of Public Health, 2003

Thesis (D. Min.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 2002. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 167).

The purpose of this thesis is to show through a chain of events how the Lutheran Mission societies in their quest to provide health care through biomedicine to indigenous people in Southern Africa ended up co-operating with the South African government in the implementation of the policy of apartheid. The question that this thesis will thus seek to answer is the following: If foreign missionaries were motivated to the extent that they left their homes in Europe and North America, why did they allow their hospitals to be subjected to government takeovers without offering much by the way of resistance? Biomedicine was not introduced to supplement the existing traditional health systems but to replace them. Black people had ways and means to attend to their sick through traditional health systems such as izinyanga, izangoma, and izanusi among the Zulu, and dingaka and didupe among the Sotho-Tswana. In Southern Africa, the missionaries saw suffering and great need, and worked as lay medical practitioners to alleviate health problems long before apartheid was formally introduced after the National Party came to power in 1948. Subsequently, they worked with trained medical missionary nurses and doctors. The Lutheran missionaries saw biomedicine as being not far-removed from advancing their mission work of converting the indigenous people to Christianity. In their provision of basic biomedicine from small structures, the Lutheran missionaries developed their health centres into hospitals by means of assistance from home societies before apartheid became the policy of the government. Financial assistance was also received from the South African government especially in the 1960s to combat the tuberculosis epidemic. However dedicated the missionaries were, they were condemned to see their influence gradually reduced because they were forced to rely on government subsidies in the running of the hospitals. In the 1970s, the apartheid government nationalized Lutheran and other mission hospitals. The hospitals were taken over and handed to the newly-established homelands and self-governing states to run. Under this new management, the mission hospitals’ quality of service was compromised. The question is: why did the Lutheran missions allow their hospitals to be nationalized? Overall, one can see that the Lutheran missions were influenced by race when they excluded black people from participating in the running of the mission hospitals, despite Blacks having taken over the running of the former mission churches since the 1960s. In Botswana, nationalization occurred differently. There was no total take-over of mission hospitals and the attendant exodus of white medical missionaries. From the time of independence in 1966, the Botswana government decided to work with mission societies in health care. The government formulated health policies and provided part of the financial needs of the hospitals, while the mission societies provided personnel and ran the hospitals. For example, the Bamalete Lutheran Hospital (BLH) in Ramotswa continues to be run by the Hermannsburg Mission Society. The national Lutheran Church played an important role in the hospital as the Church was part of the governing board. This thesis has attempted to show that, while the Lutheran missionaries were motivated to develop a health care system for the indigenous people through the introduction of biomedicine and the building of hospitals, they were so dependent on the assistance of the apartheid government, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, that they could not see that their collaboration with the government in the nationalization of mission hospitals was in fact a collaboration with apartheid. Some individual mission doctors and nurses, especially in the Charles Johnson Memorial Hospital in Nquthu, resisted the nationalization programme, but not the Lutherans. These were paralysed in the face of the pseudo-nationalization programme of the apartheid regime. The interpretation of the Lutheran doctrine of the ‘Two Kingdoms’, which dissuades Christians from interfering in the sphere of secular governance, may have had bearing on their reluctance to challenge the apartheid regime to provide better health care. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

Thesis (D. Miss.)--Reformed Theological Seminary, 2001. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-234).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 2002. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 167).

Thesis (D. Miss.)--Reformed Theological Seminary, 2001. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-234).