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European missionary activity enabled not only the communication of the Christian message, but facilitated the dissemination of a mélange of diseases amongst epidemiologically disparate cultural groupings. This paper explores the influence of disease upon the London Missionary Society’s South Seas missions between 1797 and 1860. I argue that disease shaped missionary activity in three central ways: Firstly, through shaping missionaries’ primary experiences; secondly, through moulding the ways in which native peoples conceptualised and responded to the Christian message; and finally, through contributing profoundly towards missionary conceptions of European superiority and the Polynesian ‘other’. European missionary activity enabled not only the communication of the Christian message, but facilitated the dissemination of a mélange of diseases amongst epidemiologically disparate cultural groupings. This paper explores the influence of disease upon the London Missionary Society’s South Seas missions between 1797 and 1860. I argue that disease shaped missionary activity in three central ways: Firstly, through shaping missionaries’ primary experiences; secondly, through moulding the ways in which native peoples conceptualised and responded to the Christian message; and finally, through contributing profoundly towards missionary conceptions of European superiority and the Polynesian ‘other’. European missionary activity enabled not only the communication of the Christian message, but facilitated the dissemination of a mélange of diseases amongst epidemiologically disparate cultural groupings. This paper explores the influence of disease upon the London Missionary Society’s South Seas missions between 1797 and 1860. I argue that disease shaped missionary activity in three central ways: Firstly, through shaping missionaries’ primary experiences; secondly, through moulding the ways in which native peoples conceptualised and responded to the Christian message; and finally, through contributing profoundly towards missionary conceptions of European superiority and the Polynesian ‘other’. European missionary activity enabled not only the communication of the Christian message, but facilitated the dissemination of a mélange of diseases amongst epidemiologically disparate cultural groupings. This paper explores the influence of disease upon the London Missionary Society’s South Seas missions between 1797 and 1860. I argue that disease shaped missionary activity in three central ways: Firstly, through shaping missionaries’ primary experiences; secondly, through moulding the ways in which native peoples conceptualised and responded to the Christian message; and finally, through contributing profoundly towards missionary conceptions of European superiority and the Polynesian ‘other’.
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