A Charlottetown Patriot review of the play McClure put it succinctly: “This is a show every Canadian should see, written about a man every Canadian should know.”

This was referring to Robert Baird McClure and his work as a missionary doctor in China and Taiwan between 1923 and 1948. What author Munro Scott did not describe in the 1986 production – but did in a two-volume biography written earlier – was McClure’s other 30 years as a medical missionary in the Gaza Strip, India, Borneo, Peru, and Zaire, before he retired in his 78th year.

Bob McClure’s colourful life began in Portland, Oregon, where he was born in 1900 because his father, also a missionary doctor, had sent his wife and two young daughters out of China during the Boxer Rebellion. The following year the family were reunited at Weihwei, Honan province, China, where Bob learned Mandarin before English and spent most of his first 15 years attending the mission school there.
 

Dr. Robert McClure’s tenure as a medical missionary in India lasted from 1954-1967. [Photo, courtesy Berkeley Studio, Toronto, Ontario, Ind. 65-62]

He completed high school in Toronto and graduated from the University of Toronto Medical School in 1922 before returning to China in 1924 to replace a United Church missionary doctor who had been murdered by bandits at a hospital in Hwaiking. There Bob not only performed surgery but also made numerous mechanical improvements that included enhancing the lighting in the operating room by using skills learned earlier when he had worked summers at a Toronto factory.

In 1926, Amy, a student nurse he had met at university, arrived in China to marry him but within one year they had the first of many separations when nationalist fervor forced foreigners to leave. They later settled in Taiwan where two of their four children were born.

A study leave in 1930 enabled Bob to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh University before returning to Hwaiking as Chief of Surgery. There, by teaching a number of Chinese enough about medicine to be able to do x-rays, lab tests, and minor surgery, he also developed a rural medical system that extended over an area of 5,000 square miles. He affectionately referred to these assistants as his “quacks.”

A radiology course in Sweden in 1934 and a donation of radium by Vincent Massey, later Canada’s Governor General, enabled Bob to become the first missionary doctor to provide radium treatment to cancer patients in inland China.

Soon after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, McClure was seconded to the International Red Cross (IRC) as Field Director for North and Central China. This entailed attending civilians injured from massive air raids, feeding and housing refugees, seeing that wounded soldiers were treated in field and missionary hospitals, and establishing orphan-ages. Because of bombed trains and rail lines, Bob often travelled by bicycle so that as Scott wrote in McClure: The China Years of Bob McClure (1977), it became “an almost routine day for McClure to cycle a hundred miles, hold some meetings, inspect some stores and end up doing some surgery in a mission operating room.”
 

1.  A medical missionary for more than half a century, Dr. Robert McClure was one of the world’s great humanitarians of the 20th century.  [Photo, courtesy Berkeley Studio, Toronto, Ontario, Ind. 65-57]  2.  Dr. Robert McClure’s missionary service as medical surgeon in China began in 1923 and lasted for nearly one-quarter of a century. [Photo, courtesy The United Church/Victoria University Archives, Toronto/Accession No: 76.001 P 4383]

Despite his Red Cross connection, McClure was captured by the Nationalists, and since he was not a communist, was questioned personally by Mao Tsetung as to why he helped the Chinese. He also had a price put on his head by the Japanese as a suspected spy. He also met Madame Chiang Kaishek and the Generalissimo who, in 1938, asked him to attend an IRC meeting in England. This was followed by a fundraising tour that eventually took him to Toronto where he arrived a week ahead of his family who had been detained in Japanese territory for a year before being allowed to leave China.

When Bob returned to China via India in February 1939, he was only the second person to drive a vehicle over the Burma Road. In charge of moving medical and other supplies into China over the newly created road, Bob wrote to Amy, “It seems funny for a surgeon to be doing this work in wartime.” Soon, however, as there was no other medical person present, he became involved in medical work.

That December he was severely injured when pinned between two trucks and was invalided home to Toronto in March. In another speaking tour that followed, he criticized Canada for selling nickel to Japan. Although the charge was not denied, McClure was summoned to Ottawa where Prime Minister Mackenzie King ordered him to apologize publicly or go to jail. An angry McClure wrote the apology.

Before returning to the Burma Road in command of a Quaker-sponsored Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), he also applied for and became one of two civilians to take pilot training with young Norwegian volunteers being trained in Canada by the Toronto Flying Club. When Burma fell to the Japanese and supplies were airlifted over the Himalayas to China, McClure organized local villagers as stretcher-bearers for downed air crews; he himself parachuted from rescue planes a number of times to treat the injured before they were carried to field hospitals.

In December 1943, McClure collapsed from fever and overwork. His rehabilitation in Toronto soon turned into another tour that raised funds from numerous sources including $500,000 from the Canadian Red Cross. By May he was back with the FAU whose activities later included taking over some of the missionary hospitals as the Japanese retreated. China, however, continued to be torn by civil war between the Nationalist and Communists forces and, in December 1948, after seeing his Hwaiking hospital reduced to rubble and on learning that his eldest daughter was ill, he left China.

Back in Toronto he joined a clinic but within eighteen months he was reapplying for mission work. India seemed likely, but when a former colleague of the FAU wired that a hospital treating Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip needed a surgeon, McClure arranged with the United Church for him to serve there for a year. He stayed three, and, when he left to take over a hospital at Ratlam, India, in 1954, the new hospital superintendent wrote of his departure: “I have certainly never seen any group of people who loved their chief more than did the hospital staff, the patients, and the people of the city of Gaza.”

His start at the hospital at Ratlam did not provoke the same affection when he fired some incompetent staff members and was critical of others who did not measure up to his demands. McClure’s enthusiasm and outlook, however, soon affected the staff positively. He introduced programs to train lab and x-ray technicians, conducted public health seminars, and held screenings to identify and treat TB patients.

On one occasion he amazed the operating room staff while performing major surgery on a woman whose husband, standing by to give a blood transfu-sion, disappeared. McClure promptly climbed onto the donor’s gurney, gave his own blood, and then completed the operation. Later McClure wrote to a colleague that he loved his medical work in India and “if I am spared for ten years to do this work it will be the height of my ambi-tion.”

In 1956 Amy joined him at Ratlam and during the next 11 years McClure added a dental clinic, inoculated thousands of children with polio vaccine that he had Connaught Laboratories donate, battled both Indian and Canadian bureaucracies, personally acknowledged all gifts and donations sent to the mission hospital, and continued to perform annually hundreds of operations that included numerous reconstructive surgeries on people deformed by leprosy.

When McClure retired in November 1967, there was once again an outpouring of affection as hundreds swamped the train station, weighing both Bob and Amy down with traditional garlands and flowers.

In 1968 he was elected Moderator of the United Church of Canada – the first layman to hold that office – and for the next two and a half years his outspoken views on everything from the lack of parishioner generosity to his belief in removing life-support systems in cases of irreparable damage or agonizing terminal illness made headlines across Canada.

He refused the $16,000 annual salary and, when he travelled throughout Canada and made trips to Britain, the Middle East, and Africa, his expenses were such that one senior member of the clergy commented, “The church may have had better Moderators, but it never had a cheaper one.”

On stepping down as Moderator in 1971, McClure went to Southeast Asia to do a family-planning survey for Oxfam and, by year end, he and Amy were at a Methodist mission hospital in Borneo. McClure had volunteered to be an assistant surgeon but, when the chief surgeon decided not to return he felt compelled to continue performing all manner of emer-gency and scheduled operations for eight months before being relieved. He then concentrat-ed on his family-planning programs and developed a kit to reduce the number of baby deaths caused by tetanus.

In 1975 he spent six months in Peru as an assistant surgeon, and a year later held a similar post for a few months on the island of St. Vincent. On returning to Toronto, McClure read that a hospital in Zaire required an assistant surgeon for a short term and promptly volunteered. He paid his own air fare to Kimpese to work in a modern hospital with a well-trained and efficient multiracial staff. He was amazed and amused one day when, during an operation, the three attending nurses began to sing a hymn and the female patient, under a local anesthetic, joined them. Bob later recalled humorously that the hymn was “Nearer My God To Thee.”

Home from that experience, McClure gave up the scalpel but the following summer relieved a doctor for two months at Port Simpson, B.C., and then continued speaking and raising funds for hospitals and missionaries in third world countries until he died of cancer in 1991, two weeks before his 91st birthday.

Mel James