These are they which follow the Lamb…..
We have been reviewing the lives of many of the remarkable women of the nineteenth century. Many opportunities opened up for women to minister in the Kingdom of God in the 1800’s. There was a tremendous new interest in religion that came as a result of the Great Awakenings that would lead to the desire to spread the Gospel. A belief that Christ would come when the Gospel was preached to the ends of the earth prompted many to be a part of a great missionary movement within the United States and into foreign countries. Jesus said, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:14)
There was a particularly great need for women in foreign countries especially in the medical field. Women in India for example were not comfortable with male doctors. Even today in Muslim countries women are not allowed to be treated by a male doctor unless he is a close relative. The need for female medical missionaries continues to be very great.
One woman who answered the call of God in her life to minister to women in India
was Fanny Jane Butler. Though she only lived to be 39 years old, Dr. Butler was able to assist in the treatment of thousands of women. She was also instrumental in founding a hospital that is still in existence today.
Fanny was born on October 5, 1850 to Thomas and Jane Isabella Butler. She was the eighth of ten children. Only her brothers received formal education. Fanny was an intelligent girl and had a thirst for knowledge, but she had to be content with teaching of her older sisters until she was nearly 15 years old.
When Fanny was thirteen she gave her heart to Christ. At fourteen she became a Sunday school teacher. Her attention was directed to missions by her pastor who was very enthusiastic about taking the Gospel to those who had not heard about Christ. Fanny developed a deep missionary spirit. She asked her parents if she could be a missionary but they would not give her their approval at this time.
A little later on Dr. Elmslie, a Scottish medical missionary, was trying to get female medical missionaries to come to India. Fanny’s sister encouraged her to consider this. At first Fanny did not think she could do it. Later she decided to seek God’s will and when she was sure that medical missionary work was for her she again approached her parents. This time they enthusiastically gave their support.
Fanny became a member of the Indian Female Normal Society. She attended the London School of Medicine for Women for her medical training. This was a new school that only recently had accepted women. Fanny passed second out of one hundred and twenty-three candidates applying for the school; one hundred and nineteen of them were men.
She was a top student and received only flattering testimonials from her teachers. She took her final examination in Dublin where her professor said that her paper was the best he had ever had from any candidate. Fanny received the prize of pathology in 1879 and prize of anatomy in 1880.
In 1880 Fanny went to India as the first fully equipped female medical missionary sent from England. Her first destination was Jabalpur in the central part of India. Owing to some complications she traveled to Bhagalpur. She spent four and a half years in Bhagalpur pouring her whole energy into working in the dispensaries and attending several thousand patients a year.
In 1887 Fanny returned home to England for a short furlough. After this she 
accepted an appointment in Kashmir specifically in order to work with the women there. She rented a little house close to Srinagar, the chief city in that area, and opened a dispensary. She was immediately pressed from all sides for help. In the first year she treated five thousand patients. At least two thousand heard the Gospel.
Fanny opened another small house for a hospital. This house was outside of the city
because missionaries had been forbidden to live inside the city. Fanny traveled daily by pony or by boat the four miles into the city to see her patients. She dressed wounds, dispensed medicine, performed surgical operations, read, prayed, and talked to the suffering about the great Healer, the Lord Jesus.
The government was finally persuaded that Fanny only meant good and they let her have some land for a dispensary, a hospital, and a mission house. Fanny had a longing to build a women’s hospital but no funds. God graciously provided the money.
About this time an English woman named Mrs. Isabella Bird Bishop was traveling in India. Even while traveling in the East as a child, Isabella’s heart was saddened by the intense poverty of the women in India. She longed to be used of God to serve them.
When she grew up Isabella married a Scottish doctor named Dr. John Bishop. After only a few years of married life she became a widow. She again traveled to the East. In 1888 she visited Srinagar and there she met Dr. Fanny Butler. She found out that Dr. Fanny Butler was a pioneer woman doctor serving many thousands of poor women, but she had no hospital. Isabella generously gave the money for the building of the hospital. It was named in memory of her husband – the John Bishop Memorial Hospital.
Dr. Fanny was just as concerned for the spiritual well being of her patients as their physical health. One by one she took many of them to an upper room to talk to them about Christ.
Thinking of how Dr. Fanny served the poor a helper later wrote, “I make my way with difficulty up stairs to receive my instructions from the brave presiding genius of the place, the doctor, Miss Sahib. Here she is, sitting at the table, with a little collection of poor sufferers at her feet. They will look up in her face, with clasped hands, and say, ‘We heard your fame, and have come far, far;’ and again the words come back, ‘I have compassion on the multitudes, … for divers of them came from far.’” Truly Fanny showed the love of Christ to the Indian people.
Constantly pressed from all sides for help the strain became too much. Fanny Butler burned herself out for the love of Christ and the Indian people. In the summer of 1889 she fell so ill that she was unable to do her work. When she recovered she went right back to work because she could not turn down the thousands of women and children begging for medicine.
By the fall Fanny was suffering so much that she was unable to attend the ceremony where they laid the foundation stone for the new women’s hospital. She continued to grow worse. Her mind remained clear and her last thought was for the work that she loved. Her dying wish was that her post might be speedily filled.
Dr. Fanny finally succumbed to dysentery on October 26, 1889. She was buried in a cemetery in Srinagar. The natives insisted on bearing her coffin to her grave. “They had eaten her salt, and no other arms must bear her.” Many people came to show their respect for this woman who had given her all to help the poor and downtrodden.
Fanny Butler left a blessed legacy for both Indian and international women. She was the first to provide medical care for many women in India. She inspired many women to join the movement for education for women, especially medical education. Even though Fanny did not live to see the John Bishop Memorial hospital completed, she is credited with its creation. The John Bishop Memorial Hospital still exists today, although in a different location. A few years after it was built the hospital was destroyed in a disastrous flood and it was rebuilt in Anantnag. (At left is a modern picture of the women doctors at the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Anantnag.)
Dr. Fanny Butler is remembered today for her care in treating Indian women both medically and spiritually. The London School of Medicine for Women established a scholarship in her honor after her death.
She rests from her labors; and her works do follow her.
14 responses to “Dr. Fanny Jane Butler”
Hello. I have written a book on female medical missionaries in India which I am about to send to the publisher. I am looking for photographs to illustrate it, and found the picture of Fanny Butler in your blog which I would like to use. Can you please tell me where you found it, or kindly give me permission to use it. Thank you
Dr Jharna Gourlay
Congratulations on your book. I hope I will be able to get a copy.
The picture came from the internet. Since it is over 100 years old it is part of the public domain. I believe you can use it without anyone’s permission. The original photo was taken by Elliott & Fry photography company if you want to give the photographer credit.
Thank you very much. I can now proceed without a moral qualm.Hopefully the book will come out in late 2016. Jharna
Fanny Jane Butler was the sister of my great-grandfather, and if I can speak for the family I’m certainly happy for that picture to be used – though as mylordkatie says, it’s out of copyright in any case. I also have a couple more pictures of her – including one taken in infancy – if you are interested in seeing them you can message me on Facebook. (Also, I have the scrapbook of religious verses and drawings that FJB put together as a child – a touching relic.)
Thank you Catherine. What a precious article you have from your great great great? aunt!! I will respond to your email later. Dr. Fanny Butler is someone whom I really look forward to talking to in Heaven!!
thank u for sending this to me. The resources the great niece of Fanny Jane Butler has is certainly precious. I have used one photo of her, and quite a lot of information about her work in India. Hopefully my book will come out at the end of the year. It is with the publisher at the moment.
Jharna Gourlay
I’ve made a little Google Photo album with the pictures of Fanny, and a selection of pages from her Bible scrapbook, which I’m guessing would have been made around 1860 or so. https://goo.gl/photos/XRM9tWvhMJVitUWP6.
Good luck with your book! Perhaps you could leave a comment here when it appears?
thank u for the google photo album and the Bible scrapbook of Fanny Jane Butler. Perhaps Cathy, u could give us some accounts of her family and early education, and what inspired her to study medicine and go to India. So far we have only Tonge’s version.
Fanny’s family was deeply religious. Her grandfather, great-grandfather and three of her brothers (including my own great-grandfather) were CofE priests. There was always a practical and social dimension to their reilgion, though. Her grandfather Weeden had written against slavery in his book *Zimao*, (1800); her father’s cousin had married Josephine Butler, the great social reformer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Butler). And an interest in the Tractarian and medical missionary movements was strong.
The family lived initially in a large house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where her great-grandfather and grandfather had run a school; but in her chilldhood her father sold the house and the family moved a little way, to Brompton Square.. Both parents appear to have supported her decision to train as a doctor – which I can evidence not only from the account quoted below but also from a newspaper clipping I have from the Standard, 16th March 1880, in which Thomas (her father) protests against a hospital’s decision to refuse to appoint the best qualified doctor for a post, on the grounds that he was “married to a lady doctor”.
“The ungenerousness and ungallantry of objecting to elect Dr. Sturgess as Senior Assistant Physician to the National Hospital on account of his being married to a lady doctor is obvious, and shines out in the more glaring colours from the fact that the Hospital owes its very existence to the unselfish, long-continued, and indomitable exertions of a lady—Miss Johanna Chandler—whose noble efforts, when they became known through the advocacy of the late Mr. Alderman Wire, were promptly seconded by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and, later, were, largely by the labours of women, carried into practical effect.”
Other than that, I can give you a relevant extract from her sister Annie Robina Butler’s book *Nearly a Hundred Years Ago*, a memoir of their father:
“Somewhere around the beginning of the ‘sixties the visit of a missionary member of the Giberne* family stirred the heart of the younger Butler children to an interest in missions which was never to die down till she herself was laid in a missionary grave; while my own missionary quickening was due about the same period,** in part at least, to a large-hearted Scotch cousin of ours, who took the world as her parish, and all missionaries as her friends, friends to be shared with others– and who finally gave Africa her life.
“My brother was accepted by the C.M.S. But the serious illness of an uncle–my father’s brother Weeden–was the cause, incidentally, of a total change of plan. But it was well that the thought had been in his heart, for the now kindled fire of missionary interest in our home was to be kept bright by Mr. Scott-Moncrieff’s successor, Rev. (now Archdeacon) Robert Long. Were there ever such missionary meetings as his quarterly gatherings were? I know of none. Being on the Committee of the C.M.S. he could, and did, secure on the spot the most interesting of the missionaries just arrived from the field, and rewarded him, on arrival at his little schoolroom, by giving him practically the whole of the time of the meeting, and a keenly appreciative audience. There was no padding at those meetings!
“And now the young daughter whose heart God had touched during Miss Giberne’s visit, got a second and effectual call– a sense of personal responsibility in the matter of foreign missions–by the loan from the Vicarage of The Finished Course, a record of the life and death of many African missionaries. “If missionary work is worth dying for, it is worth living for,” was her conclusion, and when a few years later, Dr. Elmslie came from Kashmir with an earnest plea for women doctors for India, she was the first to answer the summons. And our father and mother were willing to have her go.
“I said a little while ago that there was no favouritism in our home. But let me add here, for the encouragement of any who are thinking of a foreign field, that from the time any member of a family hears and obeys the call to publish among the heathen the unsearchable riches of Christ, that one becomes the favourite of the whole household, and everyone is pleased to have it so.”
I hope all that is of interest!
* The Gibernes were (fairly distant) cousins – Agnes Giberne was quite a well-known writer at this time.
** Annie Robina later worked for the Medical Missionary Society.
*** I don’t know who this is!
Thank u for the information. I will certainly look into Annie Robina Butler’s book when I go to the British Library.
this is just to inform you all that my book is now published and available in the Amazon. Look it up in the Google as well.
title: Piety, Profession and Sisterhood: Medical Women and Female Medical Education in Nineteenth Century India.
Publisher: K.P.Bagchi & Co. 286, B.B.Ganguli Street, Kolkata 700 012, India.
Hope you will be able to get hold of a copy and enjoy reading it.
with very best wishes Jharna Gourlay
Congratulations! I shall certainly look it out.
Thank you, Jharna. I’m going to get your book. Been waiting ever since you alerted me about it. Blessings, Mary at My Lord Katie.
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thank you