Press release about the launch of Medicine and Mission :
Aspect Design , publishers, of Malvern are very pleased to announce the publication of a new work by Malvern based author, Robert Colledge: Medicine and Mission Aspect Design ISBN 978-1-912078-48-6. £14.99. Available from Aspect Design, on Amazon.co.uk and from major booksellers including Waterstones (tip – search under the author’s name).
This well-illustrated, engaging and wittily written biography of Thomas Richardson Colledge, a nineteenth Century pioneering doctor, tells of his upbringing in Northamptonshire and education at Rugby School, and his medical training in Leicester Royal Infirmary and St Thomas’s Hospital Southwark. He then joined the East India Company and served as a ship’s surgeon for several years before being appointed the Company’s Surgeon at the British Factory in Canton (modern Guangzhou), China. Here he founded an ophthalmic hospital and achieved phenomenal success by his treatment of indigenous Chinese patients, while at the same time enjoying an enjoyably full social life in the Portuguese Colony of Macau, where among the expatriate community he met a beautiful American whom he married in 1833. He founded the Medical Missionary Society in 1838 to great international acclaim. After twenty years’ practice in China, he returned to Britain in 1838 where he obtained advanced medical qualifications in Scotland, later taking up a highly successful private practice in Cheltenham, where he lived with his wife and family until his death in 1879.