Peter Parker (physician)

Peter Parker ( born June 18, 1804 in Framingham, Massachusetts, † January 10, 1888 in Washington, DC ) was an American physician and missionary who traveled long the China of the Qing Dynasty.

Life

Parker was born in 1804 in an orthodox Congregational family. His parents, Nathan Parker (1764-1826) and Catherine Murdock († 1836) were farmers. Parker graduated in 1831 at Yale University as an undergraduate and 1834 at the Yale Medical School Doctor of Medicine. In January 1834, he graduated from Yale and his theological studies and was ordained a Presbyterian priest.

In February 1834, Dr. Parker traveled to Canton, where he was the first Protestant medical missionary in China. In 1835 he opened in this city a hospital for eye diseases. Parker specialized in eye diseases such as cataracts, but he also operated tumors and was leading the Western anesthesia in the form of ether anesthesia in China. He also worked on a wound adhesive dressing, but without success ( the Federation broke up after an hour ).

On March 29, 1841, he married in Washington, D.C. Harriet Colby Webster (* 1820 in Augusta, Maine), the daughter of John Ordway Webster and Rebecca Guild Sewall.

Between 1855 and 1857 acted Parker as an American ambassador to China.

The portraits of Lam Qua

Parker met in China to the Western-trained painter Lam Qua and charged him with portraits of patients with particularly large tumors or other abnormalities. Some of these images are also accessible online in the Peter Parker Collection of Medical Library at Yale University.