The first western-trained resident doctors in Bahrain, Sharon J Thoms and Marion Wells Thoms, were a husband-and-wife duo, both graduates of the University of Michigan in the USA.
They came to the kingdom after the request of another American missionary couple in Bahrain, Samuel Zwemer and his wife Amy, who were running a small charitable clinic and dispensary in Manama Suq in the 1890s.
The Zwemers had been writing to their parent organisation, the ‘Arabian Mission’ based in New York, to send qualified doctors to Bahrain and to the Arabian region, as it lacked modern healthcare.
The Thoms – who had committed to serve as Christian missionary doctors – decided to accept this calling to join the ‘Arabian Mission’, and to work in Bahrain.
After a year-long intensive Arabic language training, during 1899, in Basra in Iraq (then called Mesopotamia), they travelled to Bahrain.
Dr Marion Wells Thoms returning from a medical house call
On the very day Dr Thoms got off the ship in Bahrain, on September 11, 1900, and even before he could properly unpack, a seriously injured pearl diver was brought to the clinic; a shark bite had left the young man’s arm completely mangled.
For the first time here, in this clinic, people saw anaesthesia being used, when the doctor amputated the arm of the pearl diver. It is recorded that a man watching nearby had fainted seeing the procedure. But, within a week, the pearl diver’s family came back with praise for the doctor, when they realised how valuable this procedure had been in saving his life.
“The patient’s father and brothers did not return from the pearl banks until several days afterward, and one morning they all came to the dispensary with the patient. The whole family showed signs of gratitude, but the father, weeping, covered my hands with kisses and my head with blessings,” Mr Thoms’ diary states.
The American doctors soon asked the then Hakim of Bahrain, Shaikh Isa bin Ali Al Khalifa, to sell them a piece of land so that a proper hospital could be built.
After some reluctance, the ruler permitted the sale of land on which the ‘Mason Memorial Hospital’ was built and opened in 1903. This hospital, the first in the Arabian Gulf region that we now call the GCC, soon became known as the American Mission Hospital.
Sadly, Dr Marion lost her own life battling typhoid fever on April 25, 1905. Her grave now lies in the old Christian cemetery, on Zubara Avenue, in Gudaibiya, Bahrain, with two of her children who had also succumbed to the illnesses they contracted here.
The widowed Dr Thoms went on to establish an American Mission Hospital in Muscat, Oman, but died in an accidental fall on January 15, 1913.
It is recorded that in the year 1910 alone, in Muscat, Dr Thoms had consulted and treated 10,000 patients. Tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia, intestinal obstructions, the eye disease trachoma, and even camel bites and fishing accidents were amongst the diseases and ailments recorded to have been treated by Dr Thoms that year.
With the approval of the Omani Sultan, Dr Thoms chose the future site of the general hospital, later known as Al Rahma (Mercy) hospital in the town of Muttrah, colloquially called Mustashfa Thomas (Thoms’ hospital).
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