In the Canton trading season of 1836 to 1837, the British surgeon Charles Toogood Downing volunteered in the hospital of the American missionary surgeon Peter Parker, recently established in the area of the city’s port designated for foreigners....According to Downing, hanging in the hospital’s first floor receiving room were pairs of portraits showing Parker’s patients “with their different appearances before and after the operation.”
in Painters, Ports and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 2025
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