Gershom Whitfield Guinness


Gershom Whitfield Guinness was a Protestant missionary in China, where he also was a practising medical doctor and a writer.

Biography

A descendant of Guinness brewing family, he was a son of Henry Grattan Guinness, Irish Protestant missionary, originally from Dublin, who worked around the world for 15 years, and his wife Fanny, née Fitzgerald. He was educated at the High School, Launceston, Tasmania; and Leys School, Cambridge. B. A. 1891. Enrolling into Caius college in 1888 to study medicine, he received his M. B. and B. C. there in 1896.
As most of his other siblings, he became a missionary and fulfilled one of his father's dreams by joining, as his sister Geraldine had done earlier, China Inland Mission, coming to Kaifeng, Henan, in 1900 and immediately barely escaped being slaughtered in anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion. He is mostly remembered for the letters he wrote to his father while escaping the rebels, and the book he wrote later recollecting his experience, "A Great Deliverance." His biography by his sister Geraldine was published in 1930.

Family