How Tanzanians currently interact with international and national non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) and biomedical practice is critically dependent on their past experience with colonial, missionary, and socialist medicine. In an effort to approach Tanzania’s long history of interaction with biomedicine, this paper explores missionary evidence from the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UCMA) in Tanganyika, from the 1950s, to explore how Tanganyikans interacted with missionary medicine. Using missionary records, this paper asks: Is biomedical practice truly homogenous in any place where it is found? Drawing from Vaughan (1991), Comaroff and Comaroff (1997), Volker Scheid (2002), and Gaonkar (2001), I suggest that alternative medical modernities emerged in Tanganyika, resulting from relationships between actors communicating daily with each other. If theories of alternative modernities can explore how people find meaning in the present, and creative adaptation refers to people’s ability to question the present, then Tanganyikan missionary medical practices offer a glimpse of how biomedicine can be as plural as other medicial and healing systems. Through medical missionary practices, negotiations, adaptations, and innovations, it is possible to perceive multiplicity in biomedicine. In Tanganyika, daily encounters between people attempting to achieve their desires created possibilities for synthesis, as these actors attempted to understand and overcome the challenges presented by what they lacked. The result of these interactions was a new form of biomedicine unique to this context, a form that would likely be rejected in Europe or North America.