Early Life and Missionary Work
White was born in Bowral, New South Wales. After studying medicine at the University of Sydney, he married Mary Bellingham and together they travelled to Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) as Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries in 1938, where White established a hospital at Mvumi Mission which soon replaced Kilimatinde as the main medical centre of the CMS mission in Tanganyika.
White succeeded Dr Cyril Wallace as the medical secretary of the Diocese of Central Tanganyika in 1939. He wrote his first book, Doctor of Tanganyika, which is factual and contains many photographs taken by White himself, to illustrate how missionary work was carried out under such primitive settings, with the local Chigogo people. In 1941 after only two years in missionary work White had to return to Australia due to his wife's illness. On the way home, he developed a boil in, to use his own words, 'a place which caused me to take a pillow, cut a hole in it, and sit very carefully (!)' Unable to take part in the shipboard entertainment he started to write. From this came the book Jungle Doctor, the first in an extensive series bearing the same name.
Read more about this topic: Paul White (missionary)
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life, missionary and/or work:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.”
—Henry Reed (1914–1986)
“Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“Writing a book I have found to be like building a house. A man forms a plan, and collects materials. He thinks he has enough to raise a large and stately edifice; but after he has arranged, compacted and polished, his work turns out to be a very small performance. The authour however like the builder, knows how much labour his work has cost him; and therefore estimates it at a higher rate than other people think it deserves,”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)