Directory_and_Chronicle_1841 — Page 469

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Medical Missionary Society.

AUG.

by no means been neglected: and, although its operations were for a time hampered by the state of public affairs just alluded to, yet have the institutions maintained by the Society yielded, upon the whole, not less of happy results than in days of greater freedom from dis- turbing influences.

It is a year since the committee, in publishing the hospital reports thought it their duty to give to the public some particulars of their proceedings during the time that had intervened since the friends of the Society had met together. But as there may be those now pre- sent who have not had opportunities of perusing that statement, it will be not inappropriate here briefly to recapitulate the particulars of what was then published.

When the whole English community had been compelled by the proceedings of the Chinese government to leave Cauton, Dr. Parker was enabled, as an American citizen, to remain there. The house which had hitherto been always occupied by him as the Ophthalmic Hospital had been shut up, during all the time that the foreign com- munity was held in confinement, from March to May, 1839; and to repeated requests afterwards made that it might be reöpened, the senior hong-merchant invariably returned a decided refusal. Dr. Parker was so fortunate, however, as to find a convenient place for receiving applicants (very few in-door patients being admitted), in the dispensary of Messrs. Cox and Anderson, both then at Macao. The report of his proceedings there during the year 1839, as also a previous report for the last quarter of 1838, have been already pub- lished by the committee. Dr. Parker remained at Canton till the month of June, 1840; when, upon the establishment of a blockade of the port, he closed the hospital; and, with the full approbation of the committee, took that occasion to pay a long-purposed visit to his native land. He went with the expectation of returning to resume his labors here after an absence of a year or two.

At the time of the Society's last meeting, the 20th of November, 1838, the hopes entertained of the arrival of a physician from Eng- land or America, to extend the Society's operations had not yet been realized and after the hospital at Macao had been kept open by Dr. Parker, during the months of July, August, and September, it had become necessary to close it on the return of that gentleman to his usual field of labor at Cauton in October. In the following January, however, the expectations of the Society were gratified by the arrival from England of William Lockhart, esq., M. R. c. s.; a gentleman of whose high professional talents and character most of the members