The Medical Mission in Southern Taiwan

On a summer day in 1865, James Laidlaw Maxwell — known in Taiwan as Ma Yage — stepped ashore at the port of Dagou with a medicine chest and the New Testament in Chinese. He was the first Western physician to establish a permanent medical presence in Taiwan, and his arrival initiated a mission that would, over the following three decades, transform the social landscape of southern Taiwan in ways that went far beyond the conversion of souls.

Maxwell's early months were difficult. He attempted to set up a practice in Tainan city, only to find himself at the center of a rumor campaign accusing foreign doctors of removing the eyes and organs of their patients. A crowd surrounded his clinic and the hostility made continued operation impossible. He withdrew to Dagou, established a small hospital, and used effective treatment of conditions that local practitioners could not manage to build a reputation that slowly extended his credibility. Within a few years he was able to return to Tainan and establish the permanent presence that became the foundation of Western medicine in Taiwan.

Hugh Ritchie arrived in 1867 to take on the evangelical side of the mission. Where Maxwell built hospitals, Ritchie built churches — not just in the coastal port towns but in the agricultural interior, among farming communities that had had almost no contact with Western culture. He trained local preachers who could continue the work in places he could not personally reach, and invested heavily in producing Taiwanese-language materials, including translations of scripture into the vernacular Hokkien spoken across the region.

William Campbell directed his energies primarily toward the education of the blind, establishing what was almost certainly the first school for blind students in Taiwan's history. He also produced a comprehensive Hokkien-English dictionary that documented the spoken language of southern Taiwan with a linguistic precision that made it an invaluable resource for subsequent generations of scholars. Carstairs Douglas had preceded him in the linguistic documentation project, completing his Amoy Chinese-English Dictionary before his death in 1877 and providing the lexical foundation for the Romanized writing system — called 白話字, 'vernacular script' — that made the Bible and educational materials accessible to readers without classical education.

The medical missions established by Maxwell and his colleagues were the direct ancestors of several of Taiwan's most important hospitals. The linguistic documentation they produced preserved a detailed record of southern Taiwanese vernacular speech at a time when the classical Chinese educated class had little interest in recording it.