Swain, Clara A. (1834–1910)

American medical missionary to India who founded the first hospital for women there. Born Clara Swain on July 18, 1834, in Elmira, New York; died on December 25, 1910, in Castile, New York; tenth and youngest child of John Swain and Clarissa (Seavey) Swain; attended public schools in Castile, New York, Female Seminary in Canandaigua, New York, and Castile Sanitarium; graduated from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1869; never married; no children.

Clara Swain was born in 1834 in Elmira, New York, and grew up in Castile, in the Genesee River Valley. After taking her teaching certificate, she spent her early 20s working in area schools. In 1865, following a three-year course of medical training at the deeply spiritual Castile Sanitarium, run by Dr. Cornelia A. Greene , Swain began medical study at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After graduating in 1869, Swain responded to an appeal for a woman to undertake medical care and instruction for girls in an orphanage and women in seclusion in Bareilly, northwest India. Recommended and endorsed by her instructors, Swain was sponsored by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She sailed for India on November 3, 1869, along with another Methodist, Isabella Thoburn , arriving in Bareilly on January 20, 1870. In an effort to both recruit assistants and educate local women about medical concerns specific to women, she began lectures in anatomy, physiology, and materia medica to a class of 17, 14 from the orphanage and 3 young married women. In three years, 13 had passed the exams allowing them to practice in "all ordinary diseases."

In 1871, the Nawab of Rampore donated the land located next to the Methodist Mission in Bareilly for the building of a women's hospital. A dispensary was completed on this site in May 1873 and the first women's hospital in India was opened in January 1874, designed so that women in seclusion could come without breaking caste rules. Overworked, Swain returned to Castile in 1876 to recover her health, but in 1879, even though she was still less than robust, she went back to Bareilly. At the request of Rajputana, the rajah of Khetri, in 1885 Swain became the court appointed physician for his wife, the rani, and the women of his palace. She continued in this position for the remainder of her time in India, interrupted only by a visit to the States on furlough in 1888. In 1896, Swain retired from active missionary service and returned to her family home in Castile, New York. In 1907–08, during the Jubilee Celebration of the Methodist mission to India, Swain returned for an extended visit. She spent her last years in Castile at the home of Mary T. Greene , niece and successor of Cornelia Greene, and died there on Christmas Day, 1910. Recognized as the first female missionary physician to minister especially to woman and children, Swain not only established better health care for women in India but also provided them with educational and employment opportunities as well. The Clara Swain Hospital, greatly enlarged and now open to women and men, is still operating in Bareilly.

sources:

Hoskins, Robert. Mrs. Clara A. Swain, M.D., First Medical Missionary to the Women of the Orient. Boston, MA: Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1912.

Wilson, Dorothy Clarke. Palace of Healing: The Story of Dr. Clara Swain, First Woman Missionary Doctor, and the Hospital She Founded. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

suggested reading:

Swain, Clara A. A Glimpse of India. Women in American Protestant religion, 1800–1930 series. NY: Garland, 1987.

collections:

Some papers relating to Swain's mission, including a copy of her manuscript A Glimpse of India, which represents the bulk of her letters from India, are housed in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College.

Amanda Carson Banks , Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville, Tennessee