Medicine as a Lens to Examine Cross-Cultural Encounters: A Study of Medical Missionary Samuel Hayward Ford’s Writings in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

Abstract

Summary Medical missionary Samuel Hayward Ford arrived in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands in the late 1830s, a few years before the formal colonisation of the country. His letters and medical reports to the Committee of the Church Missionary Society revealed the complicated and malleable nature of medicine in the cross-cultural encounter. Through close study of Ford’s writings, this article argues that medicine worked to transform and interweave Māori and missionary worlds in precolonial New Zealand. Experiencing the spread of disease in the Bay of Islands, Ford practised and was influenced by evangelical humanitarianism, and he was also entangled in the politics of empire. More than this, his medicine exposed the missionary objective to transform Māori society, and it showcased not just cultural differences regarding medical knowledge but also the exchange of ideas and treatments between Māori and the missionaries.