This thesis analyses the interaction between missionary medicine and Ndyuka medicine from the perspective of a Baptist missionary nurse operating a clinic in the village of Lantiwei in Suriname. Based on two months of anthropological fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2014, this thesis argues that in her everyday practice of medicine, the Baptist nurse is dependent on the cooperation of a local Ndyuka healer and his family to such an extent that their working together can be regarded as a social form of symbiosis. This thesis furthermore demonstrates that the Baptist nurse has incorporated Ndyuka ideas to her understanding of illness and death, and that even though she continues to abhor and reject the practice of Ndyuka medicine as a form of devil worship, she recognizes its spiritual powers. Taken together, these findings show that an opposition between missionary medicine as a—perhaps unwitting—agent of modernity and local Ndyuka medicine as a ‘traditional’ form of medicine increasingly superseded by ‘modern’ medicine, is fictitious, and that the lack of scholarly attention to the interaction of missionary medicine with local practices of medicine demontrates anthropology’s obsession with the ‘traditional’ ‘Other’.

The thesis explores the intersection between medicine and religion in the context of colonisation in Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I will focus on the work of medical missionaries from Europe and North America that pursued perfect cleanliness in body, mind and society, including total abstinence and spiritual cleanliness, by spreading biomedical concept of hygiene. One of the points that I will articulate is the ways in which medicine as a colonising force in its own right worked in the mission field to produce 'the docile bodies of people' in the Foucauldian sense. I will argue that what mission medicine in Korea utilised and relied on for its work was a new concept of cleanliness based on biomedical knowledge, the germ theory, rather than the power of colonisation. It was because mission medicine in Korea often worked without collaborating with direct colonial powers. In this sense, Protestant Christianity and biomedicine shared a common foundation in 'cleanliness.' Consequently, I will try to emphasise the multi-dimensional and multi-directional role of the use of cleanliness as an efficacious tool for control of the body. In relation to the historiography of medicine in Korea, I will argue that Confucianism served the social and cultural control of bodies as a medicalised form and that Christianity tried to replace it by providing new knowledge concerning body, disease, health, and cleanliness. In the same respect, I will explore the historical relationship between the germ theory and missionary medicine in Korea. The germ theories of disease were not simply a new etiology but also an effective cultural implement to change people's lives. Thus, the theories did not simply remain in the realm of medicine but were introduced, disseminated, and applied to all matters relating to the body, including its mental and spiritual aspects, through the concept of cleanliness.

Cette thèse examine le processus de la médicalisation de la maternité dans la province méridionale chinoise du Guangdong entre 1879 et 1938. En explorant ce phénomène à travers l’œuvre médicale missionnaire menée dans la région, cette analyse tente de voir comment la prise en charge médicale des parturientes, puis des futures et nouvelles mères chinoises a pu se traduire sur le terrain, en parallèle ou en dehors des politiques gouvernementales pour le moins limitées. Elle met particulièrement en lumière les manifestations locales de ce processus et l’appréhende selon la perspective des principales concernées : les femmes.Espérant convertir les populations féminines, les missionnaires chrétiens présents dans le Guangdong, particulièrement ceux appartenant à la mission presbytérienne américaine, ont développé une offre de soins qui répondait à la norme sociale chinoise de la ségrégation sexuelle. Au sein des établissements de santé spécialisés ou adaptés à l’accueil des femmes, ils ont également organisé des maternités, ainsi que des services de santé maternelle et infantile, chargés d’étendre la prise en charge des parturientes en amont et en aval de l’accouchement. Si leurs efforts ont pu être en partie freinés par la double position de subordination qu’occupaient les femmes dans l’organisation sociale confucéenne, il n’en reste pas moins que les missionnaires ont rencontré plus d’une sociétés chinoises dans le sud de la Chine et que certaines de ces particularités locales ont facilité, dans une certaine mesure, leurs efforts de médicalisation. Étant moins soumises à la ségrégation des sexes et plus impliquées dans l’économie familiale, y compris en dehors du foyer, qu’ailleurs en Chine, les femmes du Guangdong ont été relativement nombreuses à compléter des formations médicales et infirmières dans les programmes missionnaires. Par conséquent, la profession médicale a connu une véritable féminisation/sinisation, et cette région du monde s’est révélée être un terrain beaucoup plus propice à l’innovation sociale et à l’émancipation des femmes que bien des pays occidentaux. Principales forces motrices de la médicalisation de la maternité, les femmes, professionnelles comme profanes, soignantes comme patientes, n’ont pas que reçu passivement les normes, les savoirs et les pratiques de la médecine occidentale. Elles ont négociés ce modèle sur la base de leurs repères socioculturels et ont contribué à en redessiner les contours, faisant passer la médicalisation par un réel processus de naturalisation. / This thesis examines the medicalization of maternity in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong between 1879 and 1938. By exploring this phenomenon through the medical missionary work carried out in the region, this analysis tries to understand how the medical care of the Chinese parturients and mothers was implemented on the ground, alongside or outside the limited government policies of the time. It highlights the local manifestations of this process and examine it from the perspective of those who are most involved: the women.The Christian missionaries in Guangdong, especially those belonging to the American Presbyterian Mission, hoped to convert the female population and developed care services that met the Chinese social norms and expectations of gender segregation. In specialized or adapted health facilities, they also organized maternity hospitals, as well as maternal and child health services, which aimed to extend the care before and after delivery. While their efforts may have been partially hampered by the doubly-subordinate position of women in Confucian social organization, the missionaries encountered more than one Chinese society in the south of the country. Some local features may have facilitated their efforts to bring Western medicine to the population.Being less subject to gender segregation and more involved in the family economy than other Chinese women, many women in Guangdong completed medical and nursing training in mission programs. As a result, the medical profession experienced a genuine feminization and sinicization. Moreover, this region of the world proved to be much more conducive to social innovation and women's emancipation than some of the Western countries from which the missionaries came. As the main driving forces in the medicalization of maternity, women (both professionals and non professionals, as caregivers or as patients), did not just passively receive and accept the norms, knowledges and practices of Western medicine. Rather, they negotiated them on the basis of their own socio-cultural values and, by doing so, helped to reshape their contours. In this way, medicalization became, at the same time, a process of naturalization.

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