Peter Parker: Initiator of Modern Medicine in China *

In the fall of 1830, a fair and handsome youth from Framingham, Massachusetts, joined the senior dass of Yale College. He was destined to become not only one of its most distinguished members, but also to shed luster upon the two recently founded professional schools in divinity and in medicine. The personal characteristics that, in degree at least, set him apart from his dassmates were earnestness of purpose and devoutness. These were to carry him into lands far removed from the New England of his youth, amidst a culture strangely different from that which had moulded him in his formative years. Peter Parker was born in 1804, and brought up on a farm,-as was so frequently the case with the college student of the time, and in an atmosphere of straitened living and rigid piety. To wrestle for a livelihood and to live constantly conscious of another world were the stern realities which he faced throughout his youth. Not only was the latter based on the traditional and austere congregationalism of New England, but to it had been added in these early years of the nineteenth century an evangelistic motif expressed in waves of revivalism. It was a time of introspection following after an orgy of realism and, like the "Great Awakening" of the preceding century, left a heavy impress upon its generation. Emotional reactions ranged from the depth of despair to the height of exaltation. Since the time of Jonathan Edwards, however, there had come a sense of duty that involved something more than personal salvation, the realization of one's responsibility to mankind at large. This gained its broadest expression in the mission movement, most idealistically expressed in the vision of those three students dreaming under the shadow of Greylock, of the conversion of the whole world to Christianity in their generation. Practically, it led to the formation of many organizations for sending aid from the