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Clara Swain
Healing Bodies, Ministering to Souls
Clara Swain’s arrival in India started off on the wrong foot. After traveling two months by ship over rough seas, she finally stepped ashore in Bombay to discover that the horses pulling her carriage refused to budge. In fact, one horse simply lay down in the middle of the dirt road. Clara wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and settled into a fitful sleep, surrounded by strangers and aware that the fires winking in the distance weren’t for warmth or cheer, but to deter wild tigers from approaching the village.
When fresh horses were found several hours later, the group set off, traveling by carriage, rail, boat, and dooly over the Indian countryside and across the Ganges River, until they arrived three days later in Bareilly, the city in northern India where Clara would spend the next twenty-seven years of her life as a medical missionary.
Clara was born in Elmira, New York, in 1834, the youngest of John and Clarissa Swain’s ten children. The family moved to Castile, New York, and when Clara was eight she officially joined the village Methodist church and declared herself a Christian.
Clara was a studious child. Not satiated by what she was offered in school, she often borrowed books from neighbors to read in her free time. She also discovered her gift of nursing at a young age when, as a teenager, she cared for a Presbyterian minister and his family as they suffered through the ravages of typhoid fever. After the minister and two of the children died, Clara stayed with the widow and her surviving children for many months as they recovered from their loss.
By 1859 Clara was teaching at a small school in Canandaigua, New York, but she chafed in the role. Though she taught for three years, she was frequently discouraged by the children’s inattention and the mundane daily routine. In her heart, Clara knew her true calling. She yearned to be a doctor, and she waited patiently for an opportunity to present itself.
Opportunity knocked when Dr. Cordelia Greene invited Clara to train with her at the Castile Sanitarium. Three years later she was admitted to the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, where she graduated in 1869. Clara A. Swain, MD, knew exactly how she wanted to put her degree to use. When the Women’s Union Missionary Society of America invited her to serve as a medical missionary in India, Clara accepted. She departed from New York City on November 3, 1869, and arrived in Bareilly on January 20, 1870.
Physical and Spiritual Healing
Clara awoke on her first morning of duty, stepped outside her humble dwelling, and was greeted by a group of Indian women waiting for her, all in need of medical services. She treated fourteen patients that day, despite the fact that her trunk containing medicines and medical supplies had not yet arrived from America. Shortly after her arrival in Bareilly she also began to teach anatomy, physiology, and nursing classes to seventeen students—fourteen girls from a nearby orphanage and three married women. Many of her initial patients and students were already Christians. When one of the girls first saw the model of a skeleton hanging in the classroom, she said, “Oh, Miss Sahiba [the Indian word for lady, which is how Clara was addressed by her students and patients], how will this woman rise in the resurrection with her flesh in America and her bones in India?”1
By the end of her first year in India, Clara had treated more than 1,025 patients at the mission house and made an additional 250 home visits in the city and surrounding villages. Male doctors were not allowed to examine Indian women, and Clara was the only female doctor within hundreds of miles. She often combined Bible study with medical visits to village homes and would initiate conversations about Jesus and the Gospels with the native women. In 1875 she wrote in a letter,
God has said that His Word shall not return unto Him void, so we may hope that the good seed of the Word which has been sown this morning may spring up and bring forth fruit in His good time. These people come to us with the utmost confidence believing that our medicines will cure their ailments whatever they may be or of how long standing, and while we endeavor to heal their bodies we are trying just as earnestly to minister to their souls.2
Later, after the hospital pharmacy had opened, she even included passages from Scripture on the back of the prescriptions so that every patient would “receive with her prescription a portion of the Word of Life.”3 Conversion was slow, but one by one, Clara began to see the results of her evangelizing. “How this pays for coming to India! It is better than the world or friends can give,” she wrote to her sister after learning that a man, his wife, and her mother had declared their conversion to Christianity.4
Clara realized the need for a hospital almost immediately after her arrival in Bareilly. The mission house was not adequate for the number of patients she treated each day, and the home visits, all of which were made in the early mornings before the extreme heat of the day, were time consuming and exhausting. “If our work continues to increase we could care for many more if we had a suitable place for patients to remain with us, and it would save much of our time and strength,” she wrote to her sister in 1870. “Hospitals, especially for women and children, are much needed in India, and if properly conducted might do much for their social and religious improvement as well as for the relief of their physical suffering.”5
The problem was that the nawab of Rampore owned the property abutting the mission house. The nawab was a prince-like Muslim ruler of the region who not only resisted the introduction of Western medicine in India but swore he would never allow a Christian missionary in his city. Clara approached the nawab with great trepidation, requesting that he donate one acre of his estate for the construction of a hospital for women and children. Before the words were even out of the interpreter’s mouth, the nawab interrupted him, granting not one but forty acres of his property, as well as a house, for the hospital. “We were unprepared for so generous a gift . . . and were not a little surprised at the Nawab’s immediate and hearty reception of our request, and we accepted the gift with gratitude not to this prince alone, but to the King of the Universe, who, we believe, put it into his heart to give it to us,” Clara later wrote.6
By 1874 construction of the Women’s Hospital and Medical School, the first of its kind in all of Asia, was completed. It was laid out according to Indian custom, with separate apartments, each complete with its own kitchen, where patients could live with their family and cook their own meals. Caste laws prohibited the Indian women from eating the food prepared by Christians or members of other castes. Patients arrived with their extended family and several servants as well as animals and livestock in tow. It was not uncommon for a patient to stay in a hospital apartment with her husband and children; her own furniture arranged in the room; and the family’s goats, horses, and oxen outside.
Explaining the Great Mystery
In 1885, after Clara was summoned to Ketri to care for the ailing wife of the raja (princely monarch), she accepted the offer to stay on as physician to the palace women. After wrestling with and praying about the decision for days, Clara felt God moving her to stay in Ketri, where, as the only Christian missionary within hundreds of miles, she saw great opportunity for her evangelical work. Not only did she offer medical services, but within weeks of settling at the palace she also asked the raja for permission to launch a school for girls. The raja accepted Clara’s proposal and even offered each of her eighteen students a pound of wheat flour every morning, equal to what they would earn in a day’s wages, to encourage their attendance. The raja also gave each of the young girls a new skirt and head covering so they could attend school in clean clothes, and he rewarded those with perfect attendance each week with an extra pound of flour on Saturday.
Clara and the raja’s wife, the rani, grew close during the years Clara worked in the palace. Although the rani was Hindu, the two often read the Bible together, and Clara attempted to explain the concept of salvation through Christ to her. She admitted that she struggled in the process. “It is hard for earthly royalty to submit to the requirements of the King of kings,” Clara wrote to her friend and former teacher, Dr. Greene. “They require submission from their own subjects but their religion teaches them that they may do what they please, their position in the world saves them.”7 She admitted that all she could do was pray that the Holy Spirit would become the rani’s teacher and explain the great mystery that puzzled so many.
Clara also taught Bible study to the daughters of the raja and rani, although at one point, when the raja saw that one of his daughters was growing too knowledgeable in the Gospels, he forbade her to continue her studies. The rani interceded on her daughter’s behalf, admitting to her husband that she too read the Bible and found it to be a good book and a comfort to her during times of trouble. “Let Bai read it, it will do her no harm,” the rani implored her husband. The raja considered his wife’s request for a few moments and then acquiesced on two conditions: that his daughter refrain from reading about killing cows and “too much about Jesus Christ.”8 A compromise was reached, and the rani and her daughters continued their study of Scripture.
Neither the rani nor her daughters converted from Hinduism to Christianity while Clara worked for them. Nevertheless, she remained hopeful that her teaching had not been in vain. Clara observed that the rani seemed to find in the New Testament what she had been in search of for years. Her immersion in the Bible made the raja anxious, but he did not attempt to halt the study. “He thought the Rani so grounded in the Hindu faith that the reading of the Bible would not move her,” Clara wrote to her sister. “He does not understand the change in her mind which has already taken place.”9
This Is My Country
Clara visited America twice to restore her deteriorating health, but she returned to India following each respite. While she admitted that she missed her family, she also couldn’t ignore her life’s calling. “I know you are disappointed that I decided to return to India,” she wrote to loved ones in 1879, “but knowing so well the need of workers among the poor and destitute women of India I cannot but feel that my work is among them while I have strength to work anywhere, and I would much rather go back and die on the field than stay at home from a selfish motive.”10
Today Clara Swain is honored with the distinction of being the first woman physician in India, as well as the first fully accredited female physician sent out by any missionary society into any part of the non-Christian world. Her impact on the people of India, particularly the women and children, was tremendous. Clara loved India and its people, and she considered India her true home. “This is my country, the land to which my Father has called me,” she wrote.11 It’s clear that when God called Clara to offer her services to the Indian people, she didn’t give them only her medical expertise. Clara Swain gave the people of India her whole heart.12