John Kenneth Mackenzie

Medical Training and Calling

John Kenneth Mackenzie was born on 25 August 1850 in Great Yarmouth, on the east coast of England. As a youth he was moved by the gospel and resolved to use medicine to serve the poor and sick. In 1870 he entered the Bristol Medical School, and some years later he obtained British qualifications to practise as a surgeon and physician through the royal colleges, laying the foundation for his later medical work in a foreign land.

Called to China

In 1875, at just twenty-five, Mackenzie was sent to China by the London Missionary Society, and in June of that year he arrived in Hankou on the middle Yangtze. There he helped Dr. Reid run the clinic and hospital, treating hundreds upon hundreds of patients, and he gave particular attention to helping those caught in opium addiction. His medical skill and compassion gradually became known.

Moving to Tianjin

In March 1879, because his wife's health was steadily declining, Mackenzie moved with his family to the important northern city of Tianjin, which opened the most important chapter of his life. That year Lady Mo (莫氏), a concubine of Li Hongzhang, Viceroy of Zhili, had long suffered from paralysis that Chinese physicians had been unable to cure. Mackenzie treated her with Western methods and she recovered within a month. Li Hongzhang was greatly impressed; he gave funds to support the work and urged local officials and gentry to join in.

Founding Western Medicine

In 1880, with Li Hongzhang's support, Mackenzie founded the London Mission Hospital on Haidadao in Tianjin, popularly known among local people as the “Viceroy's Hospital.” It was the forerunner of the later Mackenzie Memorial Hospital, which was renamed Tianjin Municipal People's Hospital in 1953 and is today the Tianjin Cancer Hospital (the original site is now the Tianjin Stomatological Hospital), and it became an important centre of Western medical care in North China. In December 1881 he went further, founding the Tianjin Medical School with Li Hongzhang's sponsorship. Its first class admitted eight Chinese students, and he taught them himself together with the Western doctors stationed in Tianjin. This was China's earliest government-run school of Western medicine, the first in which Chinese systematically studied modern medicine, and many of its students later became mainstays of Western medicine in China.

Early Death

On 1 April 1888, Easter Day, Mackenzie died in Tianjin after contracting smallpox while treating patients. He was only thirty-seven. In his thirteen years of service in China, his medical skill broke down people's fear and suspicion of Western medicine, and by word and example he trained Chinese doctors. Though the hospital and medical school in Tianjin were only founded by him in their early form, their influence lasted for generations and sowed the first seeds of modern Western medical education in China. His short and fervent life bore witness to the abundant fruit that faith, medical skill and self-giving love produced in a foreign land.