Quantum mechanics

Demography

Persistence (discontinuity)

Engineering

Construct (python library)

Geotechnical engineering

Economics

Protestantism

Computer science

Development economics

Environmental health

Business

Physics

Geography

Political science

Demographic economics

Population

Sociology

Medicine

Programming language

Economic growth

Term (time)

Colonialism

Journal of Development Economics

Health outcomes in India vary substantially across regions. Motivated by mounting evidence of the historical persistence of institutions and behavior, this paper studies the historical origins of this health variation. We examine the long-term consequences of the Protestant medical missionary enterprise that spread throughout India in the nineteenth century. Protestant mission medicine sought to place itself within non-European social and institutional milieus, contributing to the diffusion of Western medicine among the local population. We construct a novel fully geocoded dataset that combines contemporary individual-level data with historical information on missionary activities. We document a robust positive association between proximity to a Protestant medical mission and current individuals' health outcomes. Our analysis indicates that this long-run link is not driven by religious conversion or persistence of infrastructure, but possibly by improvements in individuals' health potential and changes in hygiene and health habits.

Long-term effects of access to health care: Medical missions in colonial India