Was Dr. Livingston really a missionary or just a....?

Question

crazed doctor who was looking for a free human lab to test his experiments?

Answer 1

That Dr. Livingstone I presume? He was a real missionary, with credentials and everything... but the answer to your question is : Probably a little of both.

Answer 2

He was real and he wasn't some crazed doctor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone

Answer 3

Explorer, amateur zoologist, and Scotsman, yes, missionary for sure, but looking for human lab test subjects I doubt.

He was sure that exploration was his calling so in 1857 he left the London Missionary Society. Africa was his third choice of places to work, but he wanted to go where his medical skills were needed and the Opium Wars prevented him form going to China, then he thought of the West Indies, but there were plenty of doctors there already.

According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone
"He preached a Christian message but did not force it on unwilling ears; he understood the ways of local chiefs and successfully negotiated passage through their territory, and was often hospitably received and aided, even by Mwata Kazembe."

Further excerpts:
"David Livingstone's father Neil was very religious and was disappointed to find his son with other men, a Sunday School teacher and teetotaller who handed out Christian tracts on his travels as a tea merchant, and who read books on theology, travel and missionary enterprises. This rubbed off on the young David, who became an avid reader...

David instinctively felt that religion and science were friendly to each other.

The other great influences on his life were Thomas Burke, a Blantyre evangelist; David Hogg, his Sunday School teacher; the missionary Karl Gützlaff, whose "Appeal to the Churches of Britain and America on behalf of China" persuaded Livingstone to join the London Missionary Society (LMS); and Robert Moffat, a fellow Scot and missionary in southern Africa (and whose daughter Mary he was later to marry).

Livingstone hoped to go to China as a missionary, but the Opium Wars flared up there and the LMS suggested the West Indies instead. But those islands already had access to the medical practices of the day, and Livingstone wanted to go where such skills were most needed. Robert Moffat told him that he was the right person to go to the vast plains to the north of Bechuanaland in Southern Africa, where he had glimpsed "the smoke of a thousand villages, where no missionary had ever been".

Livingstone arrived at Moffat's mission in Kuruman, now part of South Africa, in 1841.

After falling out with a colleague, in 1845 he moved to an out-station at Chonuane, finally Kolobeng in 1847. These missions in what is now Botswana suffered from drought but he was unable to make inroads east into wetter areas of the Transvaal of South Africa because of Boer opposition."

The Boers were Dutch white folks who had settled in South Africa.

"Livingstone was one of the first Westerners to make a transcontinental journey across Africa, Luanda on the Atlantic to Quelimane on the Indian Ocean near the mouth of the Zambezi, in 1854-56."

He was also the first white man to see Victoria Falls, the source of the river Nile and he named it for the British Queen at the time.

"Livingstone was a proponent of trade and Christian missions to be established in central Africa. His motto, inscribed in the base of the statue to him at Victoria Falls, was "Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation." At this time he believed the key to achieving these goals was the navigation of the Zambezi River as a Christian commercial highway into the interior.[4] He returned to Britain to try to garner support for his ideas, and to publish a book on his travels which brought him fame as one of the leading explorers of the age.

Believing he had a spiritual calling for exploration rather than mission work, and encouraged by the response in Britain to his discoveries and support for future expeditions, in 1857 he resigned from the London Missionary Society."

Answer 4

He was a missionary

Answer 5

He was a genuine and sincere Christian Missionary

http://www.wholesomewords.org/biography/biorplivingstone.html

Answer 6

Since when are they mutually incompatible?