18
H. A. RYDINGS
arrangements can be made for the Society's house) one, and the same building.” Amongst the reasons which he adduced for this was that the former Governor, Sir Henry Pottinger, had reserved a plot of land "between the Chinese Hospital [where Hobson worked] and the Gap" for an object of this kind. A special meeting was called on 8th July (14) to consider Dr. Hobson's proposal; two supporting resolutions were unanimously adopted, and the Society expressed its gratitude to Dr. Hobson for the zeal and ability with which he had performed his duties as Secretary, and its regret on his forthcoming departure.
As befits a medical missionary, Dr. Hobson believed in actions as well as words. The Chinese Hospital where Hobson worked, as already mentioned, was moved in 1843 from Macao to the vicinity of Morrison Hill in Hong Kong, and was thus close to the Morrison Education Society's school, from which Hobson attracted pupils to further studies in scientific and medical fields (15). In this he was following a practice established by Dr. Peter Parker, the first American medical missionary who started an ophthalmic hospital in Canton in 1835. Of Hobson it is said that the attention which he gave "to the education of young men as his assistants was amply repaid in the benefit derived from their intelligence. Some of those under his care were able to perform various operations, and one, more especially, had acquired so great an amount of professional skill that some of the European surgeons of the Colony of Hong Kong, by whom he was examined, expressed their admiration of his training" (16). These efforts may be considered the beginnings of medical education in China and Hong Kong, though it was not until 1887 that Hobson's vision of a College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong was fulfilled, long after his death, and many years later than the establishment of other medical schools in China.
The idea of a medical school was linked quite sensibly in the minds of the members of the Medico-Chirurgical Society with that of their own premises, in which could be kept a museum for specimens of natural history and morbid anatomy, and their library of medical textbooks and journals. The problem of obtaining suitable premises seems to have dogged both the immediate and the latter-day successors of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (for which however it was solved by provision of a room in the Court House, presumably through the