The Book of Bob

The Sungjin hospital, where my grandfather carried out one half of his mission in Korea, resembled a sort of peace-time M*A*S*H unit. “Outside the brain cavity,” my grandfather wrote, “there was practically no operation that we did not do from the eyebrows down.”

They resected ribs, removed kidneys, excised carbuncles, even did plastic surgery. For one syphilitic woman whose top lip had sloughed off, leaving “nothing under the nose but grinning teeth,” my grandfather fashioned a new lip from neck tissue and sent her home to her village, quite beautiful now, he thought. He did cataract operations by candlelight, removed ovarian cysts the size of wheelbarrow tires.

There were always more patients than he, stretched thin by his other commitments, could handle. The evangelical work often got in the way of the doctoring.

The position of the Presbyterian Church until that time was that medical missionaries like my grandfather were chiefly valued not for their medical skills but for the access they had to the unconverted. (“You’ll come for the appendectomy, you’ll stay for the epiphany!” their sell-line might have been.) They were Trojan horses, really – a way to build trust and get inside the gates, thence to deploy the Christian gospel. Here’s how the Korean Mission Field newsletter described the strategy: “The doctor could go where the preacher’s way was closed, the relieved sufferer would listen to the message of his physician where he would have only scoffed at the strange doctrine of another.”

But a counter-current was forming, a philosophical shift from a strictly evangelical mode, which held that Christian conversion could solve society’s ills, to a more inclusive social-gospel approach. If you were a doctor in Korea in that transition period, were you promoting conversions or providing social service?

This was to be my grandfather’s first great test.

Bob Grierson was a tiny man, five foot three and never more than 110 pounds. He was legendarily robust, a genetic inheritance. He did tricky calisthenics and strength-work most mornings until well into his nineties. These routines he transplanted to Korea. There are photos from Sungjin of villagers dotted across the exercise yard – anticipating scenes that would become familiar seventy-five years later, with Hyundai employees out exercising en masse on the company’s emerald lawns – comically knotted up in groups of two or three. They hold each other off the ground in crazy isometric friezes. It’s painful even to look at.

Life, to him, seemed to be organized in resistance to Thomas Aquinas’s definition of acedia: “the capital sin of boredom or sloth or ennui at living.” He would often read while walking, a habit that could send him veering off the path. Koreans who heard him speak their language did a double take, because he spoke it without an accent. Before leaving for the mission field, he became a small footnote in Canadian sports history. James Naismith famously invented basketball; but my grandfather (so the family story goes) brought the game to Canada after seeing Naismith’s peach buckets and stepladders at a ymca in Massachusetts.

He was, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous paradigm, a fox, not a hedgehog. He knew a lot of little things. In Sungjin, he put together an orchestra that at various points included a trumpet, cornet, sax, violin, clarinet, trombone, violoncello, bass drum, and kettledrum. They took their act to the north country, playing for church openings, conventions, revival meetings. Travelling through Siberia at the beginning of his last furlough (sabbatical), they belted out hymns in four-part harmony, like some sort of Presbyterian Partridge Family. (“I have the feeling that in no other of my varied services to the cause of the Lord and saviour did I serve him more usefully than as the Minister of Music,” he would say.)

Whether from some powerful sense of civic engagement, or just because he wanted to show off his chops, my grandfather entered the Canadian national-anthem competition. His entry was nosed out by Ewing Buchan’s “O Canada” in 1909, but I can remember my dad singing my grandfather’s entry around the house, in this way keeping it alive.