Dwight Baldwin (September 29, 1798 – January 3, 1886)[1] was an American Christian missionary and medical doctor on Maui, one of the Hawaiian Islands, during the Kingdom of Hawaii.

[2] He attended medical classes at Harvard College, but only for a master of science degree, not a Doctor of Medicine.

[3] Only a few weeks later, on December 28, 1830, they sailed on the ship New England from New Bedford, Massachusetts, with the Fourth Company of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

[7] Baldwin was first assigned in January 1832 to the mission in Waimea on the island of Hawaiʻi to serve with Lorenzo Lyons at Imiola Church.

[13] Since Lahaina served as the capital of the Kingdom at the time, King Kamehameha III and other important leaders such as Maui island governor Hoapili and his wife Queen Kalākua Kaheiheimālie would attend his church.

Although trained primarily for spiritual healing, his biology coursework made him the leading expert on Maui in Western medicine.

The few formally educated medical doctors in the islands were in private practice there: Gerrit P. Judd, Thomas Charles Byde Rooke, William Hillebrand, and Wesley Newcomb.

Baldwin instead focused on public health issues, and discovered through experience what techniques could be applied in the remote tropical environment.

These voyages were long enough that infected people had either died (and were buried at sea) or recovered by the time their ships arrived in Hawaii.

By now an experienced practicing physician, Baldwin was able to get Lahaina quarantined and vaccinated as many residents as he could, then set out to take care of people in the far reaches of Maui and adjacent islands.

Although precise counts are not known, there were thousands of deaths on Oahu; Baldwin is credited with keeping the toll to only a few hundred on Maui.

[22] He tried to retire in 1868, but Benjamin Wyman Parker (1803–1873) convinced him to help teach in a seminary to train native Hawaiian pastors.

[33] On August 8, 2023, a massive wildfire destroyed the Baldwin Home Museum alongside most of the historic town of Lahaina.