James Laidlaw Maxwell

James Laidlaw Maxwell Senior (

Maxwell studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, completing his degree in 1858 with the thesis The Chemistry and Physiology of the Spleen.^[1] He worked in London at Brompton Hospital and at the Birmingham General Hospital. He was an elder in the Broad Street Presbyterian Church, Birmingham before being sent to Taiwan by the Presbyterian Church of England (now within the United Reformed Church) in 1864. He donated a small printing press to the church which was later used to print the Taiwan Church News.

On 16 June 1865, at the urging of missionaries

He married Mary Anne Goodall (died January 1918) of Handsworth on 7 April 1868 in Hong Kong. They had two sons, John Preston and James Laidlaw Maxwell Jr., both of whom later also became medical missionaries. He retired in London in 1885 where he formed and became the first secretary of the Medical Missionary Association. He and his sons oversaw the construction of Sin-lâu Hospital [zh] in Tainan, the first western-style hospital in Taiwan. The younger J. L. Maxwell served in the Tainan hospital from 1900 to 1923, during Taiwan's Japanese era.

Archives

Papers of James Laidlaw Maxwell are held at the Cadbury Research Library (University of Birmingham) along with papers of his son, John Preston Maxwell.^[3]

References

• MacMillan, Hugh (1953). Then Till Now in Formosa. English and Canadian Presbyterian Missions in Formosa. pp. 30–34, 98.
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