Clara Swain

Dr. Clara A. Swain (18 July 1834 - 25 December 1910) was a physician and missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She has been called the "pioneer woman physician in India," and as well as the "first fully accredited woman physician ever sent out by any missionary society into any part of the Non-Christian world". Her call to service in India fell from a need to have a female physician provide quality medical care to high-caste women, that were religiously secluded to zenana. Supported by the Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Swain left the United States in 1869, for Bareilly, India, where she spent the next twenty-seven years of her life treating women and children from illnesses, while simultaneously working to evangelize natives.

By the end of her first year in Bareilly, Swain had acquired seventeen medical students, clinically trained under her supervision, and had treated at minimum, 1,300 patients. Within the next four years, she helped establish the first hospital in India for women and children.

Swain was born in Elmira, New York and raised in Castile, New York. Her father, John Swain, was of Irish descent and her mother, Clarisa Seavey, carried New England ancestry. At age eight, Swain joined the Methodist Church, a decision that would influence her aspirations of assuming a "Christian profession". Following her religious studies, at age twenty-one, Swain began teaching private pupils in Castile and subsequently moved to Canandaigua, New York to formally teach at a school. There, she developed an interest in medicine by caring for the sick. Swain began her medical training at the Castile Sanatorium, under the direction of Dr. Cordelia A. Greene. Three years later, she applied and was accepted to the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, graduating in the spring of 1869.

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