Victor Clough Rambo

Victor Clough Rambo (1894 – May 23, 1987) was an American medical missionary and ophthalmologist who worked in India from 1924 to 1974 for the United Christian Missionary Society, of which the former Foreign Christian Missionary Society became part in 1920. In India, Rambo served as the medical director of the Christian Hospital Mungeli and initiated the development of eye camps, groups of medical surgeons that visited towns, set up cataract removal stations, and restored sight to the partially blind through eye surgeries. In January 1895, when Victor was six months old, the family moved to Damoh, the location of the boys’ orphanage where William taught. The area suffered from monsoon floods, starvation, and disease and over the next five years, the population of the district decreased by about 40,000 people. As more families went hungry, government-sponsored trains sent hundreds of orphans from the north of the country to the Damoh orphanage, where William started farms on which many of the orphans worked and were provided clothing and food. From his father's work, he was exposed to the consequences of starvation, cholera and illness, even noting, "I had such a boyhood... no one else could dream of." Raised in a strict Christian family, Rambo was taught to value the Bible and the teachings of Christianity. While living with the other families on the mission compound, he learned conversational Hindi from the native workers.

Return to the United States In the spring of 1904, the family moved back to the United States, after William and Kate fell ill. The family spent the summer of that year in New Hampshire on a farm with Kate's sister before they relocated to Des Moines, Iowa. In 1908, the family moved to Farson, Wyoming where they settled for the next five years, living in a small three-room house. During the five years in Farson, Rambo and the family planted crops and raised chickens for food, often struggling to produce enough for all members of the household. When Rambo was sixteen, he began working as a water boy to earn money for the family. He soon got a more permanent job driving a Fresno scraper, a metal basket that dumped dirt into an irrigation ditch, but was subsequently fired after he joined a group of workers protesting the wage. He then worked as an orderly in the local hospital and caught the attention of the resident doctor, who began to teach him common procedures such as catheterization. After the doctor left the hospital, Rambo performed many of the former doctor's duties, assisting in the operating room and helping out with emergencies at midnight. He learned to recognize and use different surgical knives and other tools and started handling the catheterization of paraplegics. He attended a nursing class and was two months short of graduating with a registered nurse's certificate when the family suddenly moved to Idaho after William was asked to preach in Emmett. In March 1914, the family moved again to Chehalis, Washington, where Rambo remained until September 1915, graduating from high school at the age of twenty-one.

Education Rambo attended Fairmount College, now Wichita State University, in Wichita, Kansas and graduated in 1917. He was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, now Perelman School of Medicine, and received his medical degree in 1921 at the age of twenty-seven. In order to pay for medical school, Rambo worked as a janitor, busboy, and furnace-keeper. While completing his hospital residency at Pennsylvania Hospital, Rambo was chosen by the head of experimental surgery to stay in the department after residency, but he declined the offer and expressed his desire to become a medical missionary instead. At end of June 1923, Rambo finished his two years of residency and applied to be an overseas medical missionary, despite having been offered the position of Dean of Meharry Medical College in Nashville at the time of his graduation. Four days after applying, he was assigned to do work in India by the United Christian Missionary Society. In June, Rambo was ordained as a minister in the Church of Christ and in August, he was made a diplomate of the National Board of Medical Examiners.

Missionary Journey Victor Rambo married Louise Birch on October 8, 1923, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The couple left for India from Seattle and arrived in Calcutta on January 12, 1924. They stayed in Calcutta for a few days and then headed to Harda, a town where they studied Hindi for about three months with a teacher. Knowledge of Hindi was a requisite for missionary work in India, so in March, the Rambos moved to Landour to study the language further. There, Rambo worked in a small mission hospital, assisting in surgery. In September, the Rambos returned to Harda to take their required first-year language oral exams, which they both passed. In December, they left for Mungeli, a small town in central India with a population of about 5,000 people, that served as a central hub for the 250,000 people in the 250 surrounding villages. The Mungeli mission station was located on one side of the Agar River and the town on the other, and soon, Rambo started work at the local hospital.

Medical missionary work Work with Christian Hospital Mungeli Rambo became the medical director of the Christian Hospital Mungeli in 1925. He worked at the hospital with Hira Lal, an Indian man who had learned to deliver children, hold clinics, and treat malaria and other diseases from former missionaries, despite having no medical degree of his own. When Rambo arrived, he faced many challenges. The hospital building only had four rooms, one for storage, two for examining patients, and one for operating. There was no plumbing or proper medical equipment, which made it challenging for him to perform surgery. He encountered a variety of surgical cases, ranging from childbirth emergencies to infections resulting from accidents. The most prevalent diseases during Rambo's early years in Mungeli were yaws and syphilis. Rambo sent workers into villages to gather all people with symptoms of these or other significant diseases and give them injections for their ailments. In one year alone, Rambo, Hira Lal and other workers treated nearly 17,000 patients in outlying dispensaries and performed over 737 operations.

During his time in India, Rambo gained many supporters, and the hospital's facilities and delivery of medical services expanded substantially, as the building grew from a four-room hospital into a 120-bed surgical unit known for treating eye disease.

In 1980, Dorothy Clarke Wilson published a biography of Victor C. Rambo called Apostle of Sight.

On May 23, 1987, Rambo died at the age of 92 in California, Kentucky. He was survived by his wife, five children, fifteen grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Due to his work in India, Rambo was posthumously inducted into the Medical Missions Hall of Fame in 2008.