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was to promote the responsibility of District Committees, by requiring their 'joint charge and control over the whole range of the labours carried on by their individual members.' The medical mission work in China was already distinguished by local financial support and greater reliance was being placed on the local committee for hospital management and administration. Given these factors, the reply of the LMS Board of Directors is understandable.
The Chinese subscribers, 21 of the richest men in Hong Kong, therefore guaranteed a sum of $2,000 per annum for the lady doctor's salary, but added a condition: that she be available to treat the women of the subscribers' families in their own homes. As well, she would be required to spend her first year learning Cantonese in Hong Kong (rather than in Canton, where LMS language training was established), so that she could mix socially with the Chinese ladies and introduce to them Western hygiene and health care. Negotiations took several months, agreement reached in February, 1903, the delays attributed by the LMS Hong Kong Secretary, Mr. Pearce, to the inability of Dr. Ho to arrange a meeting of the subscribers. More likely, since the subscribers' money was essential, the delay was tactical, Dr. Ho certainly having been able to arrange their support very quickly initially.
For Dr. Gibson, pursuit of the project was important, because he feared that the Tung Wah Hospital, having introduced some Western medicine and by now handling obstetric cases, would threaten the viability of the Alice Hospital and thereby, the mission enterprise in Hong Kong, saying:
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I feel confident that the Directors of the LMS do not wish that our Missionary Institution should be behind a purely heathen Institution in making provision for the relief of suffering.
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His vision was at all times expansionary, having set up a clinic in Kowloon in 1901, in order to bring Western medicine to a wider public. In the event, he was obliged to accept a lady doctor on terms other than he would have wished. The repercussions of this were to affect the development of the service offered by the new AMMH and lead to the resignation of the lady doctor in 1909. From that point, supervision was fragmented until 1925, when Dr. Annie Sydenham took over the maternity hospital.