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John Glasgow Kerr was born on November 30, 1824 on the "Old Kerr Farm, " one mile east of Duncansville, Adams County, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Joseph and Jane Loughridge Kerr, both of them children of Scotch-Irish immigrants. Kerr's father died in 1830 and the boy spent a number of years with an uncle in Lexington, Virginia.
Kerr began the study of Latin and Greek in Lexington, Virginia. From 1840 to 1842 inclusive he attended what is now Denison University. In the autumn of 1842 he began the study of medicine with Doctors Sharpe and Duke in Maysville, Kentucky, and had a course of medical lectures in Transylvania University. He next studied in Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia (1846 - 1847), receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1847.
For several years Kerr practiced medicine in Brown and Adams counties, Ohio. Then, hearing a lecture by a Chinese portraying the physical suffering in China which might be relieved by Western medicine, he decided overnight to go as a medical missionary to that country. He applied to the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, was appointed to Canton, and arrived on the scene of his future labors in May 1854. Almost immediately there was transferred to him the medical work which another member of his mission, Andrew P. Happer, had begun. The following year he was placed in charge of the famous hospital of the Medical Missionary Society in China which had been founded two decades before by Peter Parker and which was financed by foreign residents in China.
For over forty years he continued to head the institution. This appointment and his own energy and ability quickly made him the leading foreign physician in the city, a position which he held for nearly half a century. Most of his time was, naturally, given to medical practice. He developed much skill as a surgeon, especially for urinary calculus, and is said to have performed successfully over twelve hundred operations for that disorder. Kerr was also genuinely interested in the religious side of his task, saw that Christian instruction was given his patients, and regularly preached, conducted services, and distributed Christian literature.
At least as early as 1869 he began medical education in connection with his hospital. Moreover, Kerr gave much time to preparing literature in Chinese on Western medicine and related subjects and in English on medical matters and on the Canton dialect. The list of his works in Chinese includes a materia medica--in which he helped to lead the way in providing a Chinese nomenclature of Western medical terms--and treatises on vaccination, on symptomatology, on affections of the skin, and on diseases of the eye. It was natural that when, in 1886, the Medical Missionary Association of China was founded, Kerr should be made its first president. His crowning work was the founding, in Canton, of the first hospital in China for the treatment of the insane.
For years he dreamed of such an institution, but his mission board found it impossible--or outside the scope of its proper activities--to provide the funds. Kerr accordingly obtained the necessary money from friends and from his own limited resources. In 1892 he was able to purchase land and, after six years of waiting, in 1897 to erect buildings. In 1898 he resigned the headship of the Canton Medical Missionary Society's hospital and thenceforward, until his death he gave the major portion of his time to the new enterprise.
Kerr took a leading part in introducing Western medical practices to China. During his tenure in the hospital in Canton, approximately two hundred Chinese were trained in Western medicine and he and his assistants treated over three-quarters of a million patients. To a remarkable extent, he won the confidence and the affection of the Chinese and received substantial recognition of this in gifts for his hospital.
Kerr was married three times: on September 20, 1853, to Abby L. Kingsbury, who died August 24, 1855; on July 4, 1858, to Isabella Jane Moseley, who died April 1, 1885; and on June 9, 1886, to Martha Noyes, who survived him.
