The digital archives of Serving In Mission comprise records from several missionary societies (Bolivian Indian Mission, Ceylon and India General Mission, Poona and Indian Village Mission, International Christian Fellowship, South Africa General Mission/Africa Evangelical Fellowship, South American Evangelical Mission/Australasian South American Mission, and Sudan Interior Mission/SIM), which merged with one another from the 1980s to become Serving In Mission. The records date from 1889 to the present.
For leprosy researchers, the files of interest are those of the Sudan Interior Mission (1893-present), which (among its other activities) operated leprosy hospitals in several countries in Western and Eastern Africa. Hundreds of newsletters, reports, and publications about SIM’s activities are included in the archives. These documents include details of the establishment, management, and funding of leprosy hospitals and settlements; statistics on the number of patients cared for; photographs of the institutions; descriptions of the treatments used; and more. Of particular note is a 1935 monograph by the Reverend Albert D Helser, Two Hundred Thousand Lepers, which details anti-leprosy work done by several missionary organisations in Nigeria.
The archives can be accessed online at http://archives.sim.org/.