Marian Bottomley Hall

Life

Born in England, she is said to have moved with her family to the United States, where she grew up, studied medicine, and became a physician. She married the medical missionary Sherwood Hall, the son of William James Hall and Rosetta Hall, a husband-and-wife team of medical missionaries to Korea. Sent out as missionaries of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, Sherwood and Marian Hall arrived in Korea in the mid-1920s and settled in Haeju, Hwanghae Province.

In the final years of Japanese rule, pressure from the Japanese authorities on missionaries intensified. Around 1940, Sherwood Hall came under suspicion of espionage, and this incident reportedly prompted the couple to leave Korea. They then moved to India, where they continued their medical mission work at a tuberculosis sanatorium. After retiring, they are said to have lived in Canada. Her husband died in 1991, and she died later that same year. The couple were buried at the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery in Seoul, alongside her parents-in-law, William James Hall and Rosetta Hall.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Medical mission in Haeju: Together with her husband, she treated patients at the Methodist mission hospital in Haeju. At the time, the Methodist mission operated hospitals, schools, and churches side by side, carrying out medical missions in conjunction with evangelistic work.
• Anti-tuberculosis work: Tuberculosis was then a disease with a high mortality rate in Korea, yet treatment facilities were almost nonexistent. Sherwood Hall founded a tuberculosis sanatorium in Haeju and, in the early 1930s, issued Korea's first Christmas Seals to raise funds for the fight against tuberculosis. Marian Hall, as a physician, was a co-worker in this effort.
• Ministry in India: After leaving Korea, she continued her medical mission work in India, caring for tuberculosis patients.

Influence on the Korean Church

The Hall family is widely known in the Korean church as a family that carried out medical missions in Korea across two generations, beginning with her father-in-law, William James Hall. In that second generation of ministry, Marian Hall worked alongside her husband in medical care and the fight against tuberculosis. The Korean church and the Christian medical community regard the Christmas Seals and the Haeju tuberculosis sanatorium as leading examples of the contributions Christian medical missions made to the history of public health in Korea. The couple's burial at Yanghwajin is often cited as an example of a missionary family that regarded Korea as its "home."

Assessment

She is mentioned mainly as Sherwood Hall's co-worker and wife. As a result, her own medical specialty and specific activities are less well documented than those of her husband or her mother-in-law, Rosetta Hall. Her case may also be seen as illustrating a limitation of early mission records, in which the roles of missionary wives were often subsumed under their husbands' work. No particular criticism of her is known to have been raised.