Mission hospitals and dispensaries were established across Punjab from the 1860s: at Ludhiana, Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Jalandhar, Sialkot, Taxila and elsewhere.
For a large part of rural Punjab they were the first institutional medicine of any kind, and for women they were often the only option.
Several specialised: the leprosy work at Tarn Taran, the eye hospitals, and the tuberculosis sanatoria.
The hospitals converted very few people. They were staffed by people who intended to and who mostly did not, and their patients came for treatment and went home.
After 1947 those in Pakistan continued under Pakistani church bodies, and those in India were absorbed into Indian Christian institutions or into the state system.
This is a substantial chapter of Punjab's institutional history and it is described in mission records and effectively nowhere else.
The medical school at Ludhiana began in 1894 to train Indian women as doctors, founded by Edith Brown, and was the first institution of its kind in Asia. It is still one of the leading teaching hospitals in north India.
The mission hospitals trained nurses and compounders locally when no other institution did, and a large part of the first generation of Punjabi medical staff came through them.
Most of the buildings are still standing and most are still hospitals. What has gone is the paper. The case books, the annual reports, the photographs and the correspondence sit in mission archives in Britain and America, and almost none of it has been looked at by anybody writing about Punjab.