Daily Devotion

The Scottish physician John Dudgeon (1837-1901) was sent to Peking by the London Missionary Society in 1863 to serve at the hospital founded by William Lockhart. The travel writer Constance Gordon Cumming recorded that he personally prescribed for an average of 120 hospital patients every morning, drove long distances to attend the foreign legations, and devoted two hours a day to translating useful books into Chinese with his students. He was professor of anatomy and physiology at the Tongwen Guan and spent ten years translating an eighteen-volume Chinese edition of anatomical works. In 1884 he resigned from the London Missionary Society over whether medical or evangelistic work should come first, and continued in private practice in Peking until his death in 1901.