马林 · 1860 – 1947 · Canadian
William Edward Macklin was born in 1860 into a farming family in London, Ontario, Canada. After earning a medical degree in the 1880s he was sent by the American Disciples of Christ (Foreign Christian Missionary Society) in January 1886, and in April of that year he arrived in Nanjing, China. He was among the very first medical missionaries the society sent to China, and in January 1889 he married Dorothy DeLany, an American.
In his early days in Nanjing he rented a house in the south of the city and opened a clinic, treating the poor and sick for only a small charge for medicine. In 1890, with large funds raised in America by his mission colleague F. E. Meigs (美在中) and land donated by the local gentleman Jing Weixing (景维行), work began on expanding the clinic into the Nanking Christian Hospital (the predecessor of today's Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital; completed in 1893), which became one of the earliest Western-style general hospitals in Nanjing. He treated patients by day and preached by night, and for many years personally supervised surgery and public health work.
During the Boxer Uprising of 1900 he took temporary refuge in Shanghai, returning to Nanjing after the autumn to continue his medical work. Afterwards he set up further chapels, clinics and charity schools on Huashi Street in the south of Nanjing and at Xiaguan, and often travelled to preach in Chuxian and Luzhou (now Hefei) in Anhui. During the First World War he helped treat refugees along the Yangtze River. In 1927, when the Northern Expedition army entered Nanjing, the Christian hospital was caught up in the events, and he was forced to leave Nanjing with his family.
He and his wife then settled in San Gabriel, California, USA, where he died on August 8, 1947. He practised medicine and preached in Nanjing for about forty years, and the Disciples of Christ regard him as a representative figure of the mission's medical work in China.