John Glasgow Kerr

Who was John Glasgow Kerr?

John Glasgow Kerr was a Presbyterian medical missionary to China with the American Presbyterian Mission.

Born in Duncansville, Ohio, Kerr graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. He went to China as a medical missionary and arrived at Guangzhou in 1854. He soon took over the Ophthalmic Hospital in Canton run by Peter Parker, the Guangzhou Boji Hospital. He was there for 47 years and treated almost 1 million patients. He performed 480,000 surgical operations including 1300 urinary calculus. In 1870 he trained 260 Chinese medicals. Sun Yatsen was later a student at the hospital. Kerr pioneered mental health care in China. In 1898 he opened the Canton Refuge for the Insane, the first mental hospital in China, where he served until his death. In 1887 he was the first president of the Medical Missionary Association of China. He translated 34 volumes of Materia Medica into Chinese and authored other medical books.

One of his students in 1886 was Sun Yat-sen, who later became the first president of the Republic of China. Robert Elliott Speer, in the "Monthly Missionary Survey", wrote of him,