Kenneth Fraser was a Church Missionary Society (CMS) medical missionary pioneer in Sudan. Born at Crock Ban on the Isles of Lewis, Scotland, he qualified as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps with a view toward overseas missions. In 1920, under the CMS’s Gordon Memorial Sudan Mission, he and his wife, Eileen, arrived at Lui (formerly Yilu) among the Moru of southern Sudan. There, drawing upon his military background, he established a well regimented hospital, the centerpiece of a system designed to extend services to every sector of Moruland’s 15,000 square miles. Young Christian converts were trained as evangelists with specialized skills as teachers or medical workers. Equipped with standardized medical kits, they were sent out in pairs, following identical routines and sending back periodic reports to Lui Hospital. Centers that harmonized the services of a dispensary, school, and church were constructed at intervals of 15 miles along the main roads of the district, thus penetrating every Moru chieftaincy. Fraser’s industrious and generous Christian character, his organization of leper communities, his well-informed efforts to reform harmful indigenous practices, and his numerous successes in surgery won him legendary status. Under his methodology, the Moru became one of the best educated and most pervasively Christian peoples in Sudan. He died at Lui.

Marc R. Nikkel

Bibliography

Brian de Saram, Nile Harvest: The Anglican Church in Egypt and the Sudan, privately published (1992). Eileen Fraser, The Doctor Comes to Lui (1943).

This article is reproduced, with permission, from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, copyright © 1998, by Gerald H. Anderson, W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved.