Rushden Research Group: obituary - Dr. Gottfried Oram Teichmann

Article written by Richard Capon, 2020

Dr. Gottfried Oram Teichmann

Dr Teichman

Gottfried Oram Teichmann came to live in Rushden in 1949. He is probably less well known than many of the other doctors associated with the town. He worked at Dr. Lean’s medical practice as an assistant, but this was after his normal retirement.

He came from a missionary family. His father and mother were both devout Baptist Missionaries in India at the end of the nineteenth century. His father had moved from Germany to Britain in order to train as a Baptist Missionary, and eventually became a British citizen.

Gottfried was born in Calcutta in 1886 and attended school in India before going to a boarding school in Kent. He moved on to a medical training in London, often combining it with mission work in London’s East End.

After qualifying as a doctor in 1910, he attended a course of tropical medicine before being sent by his church to Calcutta to learn Bengali. After a few months he went to a 3-room dispensary in the forest near Chittagong which had been built in 1905. From this, he developed a hospital, school, church and facility for treating leprosy. The Baptist Mission Hospital in Changraghona is now the major teaching hospital for that part of Bangladesh. After nearly 30 years working in India he was awarded a Kaisar-i-Hind Gold medal for his services to the treatment of Leprosy.

Gottfried had married another missionary, Dorothy Goodman in India in 1915.

After returning to the UK permanently at the outbreak of the second world war, Gottfried became the Medical Director of a large Scottish Children’s Home. They were close to the young family of their son whilst there.

Subsequently they moved to Spencer Road in Rushden, to support their daughter who was bringing up two small children on her own in Higham Ferrers, and joined Park Road Baptist Church.

After Dorothy’s death, Gottfried and his daughter shared a home in Wharf Road, Higham Ferrers for some years. Gottfried died in The Rushden Hospital following several heart attacks and a final stroke in 1974.

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