1796  — 1866

James Dyer Ball (Naiye Bo)

Lucy Hendricks Mills Ball (1807-1844) , 波乃耶

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions medical missionary to China.

Ball was born in West Boylston, Massachusetts, studied at Phillips Academy and at Yale College for two years, then moved to South Carolina, where he tutored until entering Union College, New York, from which he graduated in 1826. The next year he married Lucy Mills, then studied theology for some years at Yale and Andover Theological Seminary. Ordained in 1831, in 1833 he became an agent of the American Home Missionary Society; working in Florida among the Negro population. In 1835 he established a successful school in Charleston, South Carolina, and also studied medicine, receiving an M.D. in 1837. While his sailing was delayed by a financial panic, he studied Chinese.

Ball arrived in Singapore in 1838 and began a lifelong pattern of teaching, preaching, publishing Chinese literature, distributing tracts, and doing medical work, with evangelism always his first concern. In 1841 he moved to Macao for the sake of his wife’s health, and in 1844 to Hong Kong, where she died. Ball then moved to Canton and in 1846 married Isabella Robertson, a missionary from Scotland. While running a boys’ school and supervising the publication of books and tracts, including a popular Almanac, he devoted much of his energy to touring with his medicines and tracts. After furlough from 1854 to 1857, with his health impaired, he spent most of his final years doing tract distribution from his street chapel in Canton, where he died.

Attribution

This article is reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, Macmillan Reference USA, copyright (c) 1998 Gerald H. Anderson, by permission of The Gale Group; Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan. All rights reserved.

Sources

  • Missionary Herald 62 (1866): 259-262, has an informative obituary; other issues, e.g., 48 (1852): 86-87, carry his reports. Ball is mentioned several times in Edward V. Gulick, Peter Parker and the Opening of China (1973), which describes the context of his medical work.

About the Author

David M. Stowe

Emeritus Executive Vice President, United Church Board for World Ministries, Tenafly, New Jersey, USA