Purdah Customs

Clara Swain graduated from Woman’s Medical College in 1869 and was the first graduate of Woman’s Med to become a medical missionary. She was the second woman who applied to Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church for a position as a missionary doctor and the first one to be accepted. The director of the girls’ orphanage of the Methodist Mission in Bareilly, India, had requested a female physician to aid the village. Swain accepted the position and arrived in Bareilly in January 1870. Swain believed it was important to train local women to help assist her with patients. She began teaching them lessons, spending two to three hours a day with her students, preparing them for the “examination of fourth-grade doctors,” supervised by two civil surgeons and an American physician. While there had been resistance to Western medicine (and religion) by some of the native people, the Methodist Mission was given a property on which to build medical facilities. In early 1872, Swain moved over to the new property, and by May 1873, a dispensary building was erected. By January 1874, the first in-house patients were treated at the new dispensary and hospital. The completed hospital, known as the Clara Swain Hospital, was the first hospital for women in India.

As a woman, Swain was allowed to interact with women who observe purdah [the practice of concealing women and segregating them from men]. As a doctor, she was able to provide them with much-needed medical treatment. However, she also spent time with them in other ways: some girls were trained as her assistants and others she either visited at their homes or came to visit her. While Swain was a medical missionary, she was able to gain a better understanding of not only local medical practices, but also social and religious customs.