Dan Beach Bradley, 1804-1873
by
Derick
Garnier
The Rev. Dr. Bradley
was the first qualified doctor to come to
Dr. Bradley was also a Baptist missionary, sponsored and paid by the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). But, after 12 years, he
disagreed with the Board on a point of doctrine and resigned – at great cost to
himself. His salary was stopped so for
the rest of his life he had very little money and relied largely on charity.
. He continued to preach and distributed
tracts for 38 years, yet when he died he had hardly a single convert. He lived to a good age for the tropics. Both
his wives died in
Today, he is remembered with great affection by both Thai people and
foreigners. There is a 13-storey building at the
Dr Bradley was a 6th generation descendant of a William
Bradley who had emigrated to America in 1644, only 24 year after the first
settlers, the Pilgrim Fathers. Dr.
Bradley studied medicine and surgery at New York College of Physicians, married
Emily Royce who was 22 and very strictly brought up (she wondered whether it
was ‘proper’ to ‘indulge in mirth’) and then set off for Thailand on a sailing
ship bound for Burma and Singapore.
They had a tough passage. Fellow
missionaries had been attacked by pirates and savagely beaten and cut
about. At one point Dr. Bradley shinned
90 feet up the mast to examine four ships which were just appearing over the
horizon, while the sailors ran out the cannon and prepared their muskets. They called at Amherst (Burma) to drop off
another missionary couple. and visited the grave of a previous missionary wife
and her infant daughter. A solemn
moment. Within ten years Emily Bradley
and her own baby would also be dead.
The Bradleys reached Singapore, but then had to wait another six months before
they found a ship which was sailing to Bangkok.
They arrived in 1835, but once there they could not get a house of their
own, but had to stay with other missionaries for three months. (There were hardly any houses on land; most
were small, stuffy wooden structures floating on rafts of bamboo and were
roofed with ‘attap’ which easily caught fire.)
In these gloomy surroundings, the Bradleys lived lives of rigid piety; cold baths
daily, plain food, Bible reading and family prayers; letters from home were
left unopened if they arrived on the Sabbath; and once, when alcohol was served
at a friend’s house, the Bradleys got up and left. But they also brought up three children, ran
a daily clinic and went out preaching.
All the while Dr. Bradley was weakened by diarrhea and his wife by a
tubercular cough, a disease which eventually killed her. Their daughter died of
tetanus.
Dr. Bradley was the only Western-trained doctor and surgeon in the country, so
despite their lowly dwelling, many important Thai people came calling, or sent
messengers, to invite the Bradleys to their homes. In this way they got to know almost everybody
of influence in the country even the Crown Prince, the future King Mongkut, who
saw the need to westernize the country in the face of the colonial powers,
Britain and France. But the King, Rama
lll did not agree. His policy was to hamper and exclude foreigners. So the Bradleys
had great difficulty in finding anywhere to live; they were not allowed to
travel upstream without permission; and their preaching was at first thought to
be subversive.
It was not only the rich who sought help from Dr. Bradley. He and his wife
opened a clinic, to which people flocked; sometimes nearly two hundred in one
day. The Bradleys made up medicines and wrote biblical texts in Thai on the
back of the packets. Dr. Bradley inoculated and vaccinated against smallpox,
and pulled teeth. He was also a
qualified surgeon and operated on those brave enough to bear the pain without
an anesthetic. He amputated a boy’s arm – the first time this had been done –
and performed a successful cataract operation on a man who had been totally
blind. He gave artificial respiration to
a drowned girl and, seemingly, brought her back to life. Some came with the
most horrific wounds. A three-year-old
boy had a barbed fish spear which had struck him “below the nose, passed
through his upper and lower jaw, grazed his windpipe, and came out under his
chinbone and entered his chest.” Dr.
Bradley filed off the barb and pulled out the shaft. A man came to him, having
been unable to eat for nearly three weeks.
He implored Dr. Bradley to cut his throat. Another man had rowed 20-30 miles with one
arm, the other having been crushed in machinery and needing to be
amputated.
Dr. Bradley also taught medicine. He
explained the circulation of the blood to Thai doctors and explained why it was
wrong to “dry out” mothers who had just given birth by exposing them for days
to a very hot fire. He wrote and
published pamphlets on midwifery, on vaccination, and on the evils of smoking
opium.
But his main task was to go out and preach the Gospel. At first the authorities
were a little suspicious, but when they saw how few converts he made and
realised he was not preaching sedition, he and other Protestant missionaries
were allowed to go where they liked. So
he preached in the courtyard of the Grand Palace and at the ‘Temple of the
Emerald Buddha’ the day the King was coming to change the clothes of the Image;
and inside Buddhist temple grounds. He
faced harassment and ridicule. Children
“hallooed and hooted”; adults made a cross with a figure on it and waved it in
front of him; people would tear up his pamphlets and throw them to the
ground. People spat betel-juice on his
walls and threw ‘brickbats’ through the windows while he was preaching. Dr. Bradley never lost his temper and never
raised his voice in argument. People
noticed this and began to respect him for his calm and admire him for his
courage
People flocked to hear him, but very few could understand what he said. He and his wife were learning Thai, but it
was a slow business. Misunderstandings
did occur. Dr. Bradley once asked some
of his audience what they thought he had just told them. They replied that, when they became
Christians, “they would have to get into the belly of the white man.” No wonder King Mongkut was moved to remark
that what the missionaries did was admirable, but what they taught was
nonsense. Very few people came forward
to be baptized and those who did soon lapsed
He drew and printed a map of Bangkok (one of the earliest we have). He wrote a Thai-English dictionary, sometimes
at the rate of 100 words a day; he started a newspaper called ‘The Bangkok
Recorder’ and an annual ‘Bangkok Calendar’.
He helped to survey land for the first Protestant graveyard, made
coffins for his “dear friends” and supervised the removal of their remains
(from the Baptist compound)to this new site.
He printed Thai government
edicts and laws, and Thai school text books. He wrote and printed articles on
astronomy and the solar eclipse.
People were fascinated by the curiosities he showed them: a machine for generating electricity which
could give shocks to people; an orrery, a clockwork model of the solar system
which demonstrated how the Earth
revolves around the Sun, and the Moon goes round the Earth, a machine
for taking Daguerrotypes (the first kind of photographs); a camera obscura and
(more usefully) a cotton jenny, a sewing machine, and a lithographic press for
printing maps.
As much as anyone, D.
Bradley helped move Siam into the contemporary world. She became an exporter of rice; ships flocked
to the port of Bangkok. He was able to count 100 ships moored along the banks
of the Chao Phraya river waiting to pick up their cargoes of Thai rice. Before he died he was the friend and
confidant of King Rama lV; loved by many, known to all.