Sherwood Hall

Life

Hall was born in Seoul on November 10, 1893. His father, William James Hall, was a medical missionary with the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, and his mother was Rosetta Hall. The Halls are known as a Canadian missionary family who carried out medical missions in Korea across two generations. After graduating from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine, Sherwood Hall returned to Korea as a missionary with his wife, Marian Bottomley Hall, also a physician, and worked primarily in Haeju, Hwanghae Province.

In 1940 he was arrested by the Japanese military police on charges of espionage and was subsequently forced to leave Korea. Sources give the year of his departure as either 1940 or 1941. He then served as a medical missionary in India until his retirement in 1963. He died in Vancouver, Canada, on April 5, 1991, at the age of 98, and his remains were interred at the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery in Seoul, where his parents are buried.

Ministry and Achievements

• Founding of a tuberculosis sanatorium: In 1928 he established the Haeju Salvation Sanatorium in Haeju, regarded as Korea's first tuberculosis sanatorium. At the time, tuberculosis was the most serious infectious disease. Records indicate that about 2,300 people received treatment there in the roughly five years from its opening through 1933.
• Issuing Christmas seals: On December 3, 1932, he issued Korea's first Christmas seals to fund the sanatorium's operations and raise awareness of tuberculosis. Christmas seals are commemorative stickers affixed to mail to raise funds for the fight against tuberculosis. According to one study, he initially prepared a design featuring a turtle ship, but when the Japanese authorities refused to approve it, he changed the design to Namdaemun (the South Gate of Seoul). The seals printed in 1940 were all confiscated by the military authorities, and after Hall left Korea, seal issuance in the country ceased until it resumed in 1949.
• Ministry in India: In India he likewise worked to combat tuberculosis and launched a tuberculosis seal fundraising campaign, as he had done in Korea.
• Writings: In 1978 he published With Stethoscope in Asia: Korea, an English-language memoir of his years as a missionary in Korea. The book was published in Korean translation in 1984 under the title Dakteo Hol-ui Joseon Hoesang (Dr. Hall's Recollections of Joseon).

Influence on the Korean Church

Sherwood Hall's work is regarded as a representative example of Methodist medical missions in Korea, spanning the period from the late nineteenth-century enlightenment era through Japanese colonial rule. The Christmas seals he introduced were reissued after Korea's liberation and continue to this day as a year-end fundraising campaign against tuberculosis. For this reason, they are frequently cited, even outside the church, as an example of the contributions of missionaries. Several members of the Hall family, including his parents, his sister, and his wife, are buried together at Yanghwajin, making the site a place for reflecting on the history of Korean Methodism and of foreign missionaries in Korea.

Assessment

In recognition of two generations of service to the Korean people, he received the Order of Civil Merit, Moran Medal, from the South Korean government. Sources give the year of the award as either 1983 or 1984. After his death, his funeral was reportedly held under the auspices of the Korean National Tuberculosis Association. Scholars have also examined the process by which he issued his seals as a means of studying Japanese colonial censorship and control. Goseong County in Gangwon Province has established a cultural complex at Hwajinpo honoring Sherwood Hall and Rosetta Hall. No widely known criticism of his work has been identified.