We congratulate Nursing Faculty Emeritus Martha Highfield on the publication of her new book, A Time to Heal. It is the story of how nurses planted and shaped a healthcare mission in rural, southeastern Nigeria (1953-1967). Highfield said that as a nurse scholar, she wanted to discover why and how they came to this work, what they achieved, and where they failed.
A Time to Heal is the story of how nurses planted and shaped a healthcare mission in rural, southeastern Nigeria (1953-1967). Glenna Peden RN was earliest among them, arriving in 1953 with her evangelist husband in response to years of pleading by Nigerians for Church of Christ (COC) missionaries. Peden soon initiated a volunteer backdoor nursing practice and taught missionary women colleagues to do the same. But by 1958, the COC team began to see their mostly lay nursing care as inadequate, and a new vision emerged: the dream of establishing a hospital.
They recruited professional US providers, who built, equipped, staffed, and opened the Nigerian Christian Hospital (NCH) in less than two years. Only months later, all US missionaries fled in the face of civil war, and an all-African staff took up the work of NCH that continues today.
Why did I write the book? A curiosity about these US nurses is perhaps the best answer. As a child of US missionaries to Nigeria, I heard fragments of their stories. As a nurse scholar, I wanted to discover why and how they came to this work, what they achieved, and where they failed. No archive existed, but missionaries themselves had preserved thousands of letters, clippings, photographs, and other rare materials. Gathering oral histories and sources became a work itself, and I delighted in the privilege of compiling materials from their boxes, bags, basements, and memories.
My book is for anyone interested in studies of nursing, women, missions, global healthcare, the Christian church, or African encounters with the West. Its reader-friendly style makes this history accessible to lay and professional audiences alike. Using a narrative approach viewed through a religious lens, I make every effort to record the story as experienced and told by the nurses and those who knew them. The project, like all history, is empowered and constrained by its sources and author, and only a still unfolding future will reveal these nurses’ full historical significance.
A Time to Heal: Missionary Nurses in Churches of Christ, Southeastern Nigeria (1953-1967) was published December 2020 by Sulis Academic Press and is available in paperback and ebook.
-M.Highfield PhD RN
Su 2021