A MISSIONARY in China, and in other places as well, needs a thorough education. The Chinese expect him or her to know all about the Bible and theology, and to be able to treat and cure all kinds of diseases.
The medical work is truly an “entering wedge,” and has appropriately been likened to the “right arm” in gospel work.
SOFTENING THE HEATHEN HEART
There is nothing that softens the heart more quickly than kindness and help in distress. Often have these poor, sin-fettered souls thanked us with tears, and others have kotowed—an Eastern custom of pounding the forehead on the ground, in expression of the utmost earnestness. One instance was that of the richest and proudest son in a large city, who kotowed to me for saving his father from an early grave.
In 1913, we moved the main station in Honan to a central location near the railroad. Here we built two two-story foreign houses, two schools of brick and tile, capable of seating four hundred, besides seventeen other buildings. In addition to these, a building 10x20 feet served as guest room and dispensary. And while the Chinese appreciate the school and our teaching, as also the preaching, what appeals to these heathen people the most strongly is the work done in that little 10x20 building,—the one hour a day devoted to treating the sick. This gives the name to the whole compound. It is known among the people of the community as “the hospital.”
CAPTIVATES THE ARMED BANDIT
Honan has suffered from famine for the last three years, and as a result, has been greatly infested with robbers. One band numbered over 30,000, and were well armed with modern weapons. One of the leaders had been in our dispensary previous to his joining these bands of robbers, hence every man among them knew of our work in relieving the sick and suffering. The safety of the members composing the twenty churches in the province of Honan, when they encounter these plunderers, as they often do, is assured. All that is necessary is to mention that they are Seventh-day Adventists, which at once associates them with the hospital and dispensary work, and none of them are ever harmed.
Thus the medical work wins the respect both of the people at large and of these outlaws as well; and having thus won their confidence, we are able to present the gospel with much greater results.
In our Honan dispensary, we treated on an average 120 patients each month. The following are among the numerous maladies that had our attention: malaria and other fevers, the plague, constipation, diarrhea, enlarged spleen, boils, scab, eczema, sores and cuts, sore eyes and running eyes, acid stomach, rheumatism, sore throat, coughs, colds, la grippe, scorpion bites, etc.
We often used the stomach pump to save the life of some who had been poisoned. Hundreds were saved in this way. In Chow-Chiaxow a wealthy family of seven adults, who had been poisoned by the cook’s carelessness, were saved by our use of this measure. What an opportunity is opened to us to relieve the misery and suffering among the poor, degraded people of these countries!
Preventing Typhoid Fever
SIR FREDERICK TREVES, a famous English surgeon, in a recent address delivered before the Royal Society of Arts, declared that the results achieved by inoculation against typhoid fever in the British expeditionary force have been “positively astounding.” Up to the occasion of his address, there had occurred in the British army, since the beginning of the war, only 212 cases of typhoid fever; and of these, 173 occurred in persons who had not received protective inoculation. Only 22 deaths from typhoid fever have occurred in the army during the war, and not one of those who died had been vaccinated. In other words, not a single death from typhoid fever has occurred in the British army among persons who have received prophylactic—preventive—typhoid vaccination.
Medical Evangelists to Foreign Fields
ON June 8, a class of twelve medical missionary physicians was graduated from the College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda, California. Openings are ready for all these, in some line of medical missionary endeavor. Four are under appointment for foreign fields:
Dr. and Mrs. Arthur N. Donaldson, both graduates of the College of Medical Evangelists, are to sail for China in September.
Dr. Olive Smith, and her husband, who is a trained nurse, are to sail for Burma in September.
Dr. Donald E. Davenport and Mrs. Davenport are under appointment for China, but will be delayed a few months before sailing...
The Gods, Demons, and Diseases
By George F. Enoch
The Cruelties of Superstitious Medical Practice — Barbarous Midwives — What Small Hospitals and Dispensaries Can Do to Relieve the Distress
By GEORGE F. ENOCH, A. B.
GENERAL VIEW OF THE VILLAGE OF MUSSOORIE, INDIA, NEAR WHICH ONE OF OUR MEDICAL MISSIONS IS LOCATED
The suffering of the heathen world is due to three conditions,—ignorance, superstition, and malpractice. Native medical practitioners in heathen lands are ignorant of the rudiments of medical knowledge. Their knowledge of anatomy is practically nil. They hold the crudest and most absurd theories concerning the internal organs.
In China, doctors classify themselves as “outside” or “inside” doctors, according to whether they deal with the surface or the internal mechanism. Even those who make the outside their specialty cause untold suffering through their ignorance. For example, an “outside” doctor has a sore to treat that is filled with pus. This pus must by all means be kept inside. So he puts on resinous plasters or a dab of tar; and if it suppurates and burrows its way out, he again covers it up to keep it in.
MEDICAL MISSION, MUSSOORIE
The “inside” doctor gives special attention to the internals, of which he knows nothing. He first learns the three hundred places on the body through which the skewer may be driven without killing the patient. If there is pain anywhere, he punches a hole with his needle to let the pain out, even though it may be in the eye, the abdomen, or the lungs.
The following is taken from a Chinese pharmacopeia: “Flies are of great use to man; for their heads, when pounded and used as a pomade, form an invaluable restorer for the hair. There is nothing better for that dangerous disease, lethargy, than to put fleas in the patient’s ear. . . . People have been known to put bedbugs in their beds that they might be more wakeful to contemplate divine things. One only, placed in the nose, has remarkable efficiency in the case of hysteria in females.” After reading this, any one who has had any considerable practical experience either in India or in China can say that if there is any value in these remedies, nature has been very kind to these countries, and bountifully supplied her dispensary for their benefit.
The bones of the tiger are prescribed for strength; and if one is too poor to afford the bones, he may use a tea made by steeping the tiger’s whiskers.
GODS, DEMONS, AND DISEASE
But dreadful as is the suffering that comes from ignorance, that which results from the superstition of the people is greater. The belief in demons is common to all non-Christian lands. In case of sickness, the question to be determined is not, What is the cause? but, Who is the cause? The answer is varied, running the whole gamut of gods, goddesses, and demons, and then coming to friends and neighbors.
The name for smallpox in Marathi, a language of western India, is devi, a goddess; and the particular name for vaccination means, “drawing out the goddess.” It is supposed that through the abrasion made to get the vaccine in, the goddess is able to escape.
THE DEMON SLIPPED UP ON YOU
These beliefs lead to witchcraft, charms, and spells. The demons get in by various ways. You have, for example, a pain in the back of the neck. Some demon has slipped up behind you, and with an invisible spirit club, hit you there, and thus gained entrance. Your problem is, how to get rid of him. You may have pneumonia or pleurisy, with the feeling of weight on the chest. It is caused by an invisible demon, or a host of them, who are seated there. An outsider protests that he cannot see anything, and the reply is, “You cannot see them, nor can I; but I can most certainly feel their weight, so I know they are there.”
BARBAROUS MIDWIVES
Dr. Williamson, in his little book, “For the Healing of the Nations,” tells the following story, which is repeated a thousand times in many homes. When the reader remembers that a little girl in India is supposed to be married before she is thirteen years old, and that there is a host of mothers between the ages of twelve and eighteen years, the story will be the more significant:
Temporary medical dispensary at Kalyan, India, in which over thirty thousand patients were treated in two years by Dr. Mrs. M. D. Wood and her associates.
Indian one horse Vehicle.
“The doctor is called to the home of a high caste Hindu. A mother, and a child less than a week old, are lying unconscious, having survived the unspeakable barbarities of a native midwife, ignorant and immoral, among which might have been the placing of a board across the abdomen with assistants seated thereon, to assist tardy labor.
“Every step of her treatment has been laid down in their sacred book. For the first three days, she has been deprived of food and drink, and on the third, allowed one grain of rice. Her room has been prepared by placing her in the darkest and dirtiest of the house, with the most filthy rags, and a mud floor for her bed. A cow’s skull painted red, and an image of Sasthi, the goddess presiding over the destiny of women and children, are placed in a conspicuous position. These and a pot of smoldering charcoal are the only furniture. The charcoal is to expel the evil spirits hovering round.
“During her three weeks of uncleanness, neither father nor mother, husband nor sister, can come nigh her, leaving her to the care of the barber’s wife. On the fifth day, the filthy clothing is removed, and the room cleansed, and on the next is the worship of Sasthi, and that night Vidhata will write on the child’s forehead the main events of its life. The day has arrived; Sasthi has been worshiped; the woman has been given a cold bath; all necessary arrangements for Vidhata’s visit have been made; food consisting of coarse Graham flour and coarser sugar, kneaded together, has been prepared to be eaten raw by the famished mother; but alas, both mother and child are unconscious, and the foreign doctor is called to bring them back to life. These are thy gods, O India! These are Thy rivals, O Jehovah!”
But great as is the suffering due to ignorance and superstition, greatest of all is that resulting from malpractice. How any tender-hearted Christian can know these things and be unmoved, is more than one can tell. “The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.” Ps. 74:20. “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” Prov. 12:10. Let us see how these statements of the Bible are verified:
BURN HOLES TO LET OUT DISEASE
In India and Arabia, the common method of dealing with disease is to let it out, by burning holes or branding with red-hot irons. Dr. Rosetta Hall gives this account of a visit to a Korean sick child: “The first thing the doctor did was to make a little pyramid of brownish powder on each breast of the child, and then set it on fire until it burned the tender skin. This was followed by the use of a large darning needle, which was thrust through each little foot, then the palms of the hands, the thumb joints, and through the lips into the jaw just beneath the nose.”
A missionary in India—a woman—relates a visit she paid to the home of a Mohammedan teacher where both wife and children were loved by father and mother. On the bed was a little child of three years in convulsions. “As we enter, a barber has just finished shaving the hair from the head, just over the place where the brain can be seen to pulsate in an infant’s head, and is called by the natives of India, ‘the door to the brain.’ A Mohammedan doctor lifts a red-hot piece of iron from the fire, and presses it to the exposed part, destroying the tissues to the skull; and to my cry of horror and dismay, the father in agony of sorrow answers, ‘Oh, Miss Sahib, for many days that door was open, and an evil spirit entered there, and must be destroyed, or our child will die.’”
Just one more side of this awful picture: In the polygamous households, behind the purdah, from which the poor women can never emerge, are innumerable jealousies. If in Christian lands stringent laws must be passed against such forms of malpractice as abortion and kindred566crimes, one can imagine what happens behind the mysterious purdah. Many times, the foreign doctor is besought for some poison to kill a rival, or injure or disfigure a pretty face. No one knows the awful scenes sometimes enacted there, where no human law can enter.
ONE AND ONE FOURTH DOCTORS IN CALIFORNIA
If there were only as few doctors in the state of California as there are in India or China, in proportion to the population, this state would have just one and one fourth doctors. Imagine how many suffer and die out of reach of any human help.
SMALL HOSPITALS AT STRATEGIC CENTERS
The work for the relief of the masses lying out in the villages of India must be done by small hospitals at strategic centers, and a large number of small dispensaries. We have been operating a number of these dispensaries for some time in different parts of India. A remarkably providential opening has recently been occupied by Dr. V. L. Mann and Brother F. Loasby in the Punjab. A long petition from a large number of villages was presented to our committee more than one year ago; and now these brethren are on the ground, and are opening one of the most promising fields that we have yet entered in India. The plan is to have a small hospital here that will head the system of dispensaries scattered over the land. The brightest and best native young people we have in India will be sent here for medical training, and then they will go back to the several divisions to work in the dispensaries.
To give the reader of the SIGNS a glimpse of what these dispensaries are doing, the writer will tell his personal experience. He went over to India seven years ago. Since then, work has been opened in four centers of western India,—in Lonavla, Bombay, Panwel, and Kalyan.
In February, 1913, Elder and Mrs. Wood joined us, and we opened a dispensary in Kalyan. Mrs. Wood has charge of the dispensary, assisted by Miss Elenora Reid. We had to begin the work with meager facilities, in a native house; but the suffering was great, and in spite of religious prejudices, the dispensary soon gained a foothold that has made it a permanent feature of the district. Elder A. G. Danielle recently inspected this work, and he said, “This is the most thoroughly organized and efficiently managed dispensary I have ever seen anywhere.”
The different diseases treated number forty-seven, ranging from simple ailments to cholera and leprosy. The dispensary report for the two years it has been in operation is as follows:
1913
1914
Total
Patients
11,376
16,421
27,797
Outside calls
934
978
1,912
Villages represented
72
85
Religious services held
253
272
525
Pages literature dist.
5,684
11,220
16,904
Cash receipts
$500.
$500.
$1,000
“WHERE THEY ARE KIND TO WOMEN”
What is said in previous paragraphs on the need of medical missions will help the reader to appreciate the immense amount of good that has been done by this work. When the workers are asked by the poor, suffering women why they have left comfortable homes to come across the sea, to do for them that which their own native friends will not do, the way is opened and the soil prepared to tell of the wonderful love of Jesus. This dispensary is becoming known as the place “where they are kind to women.”
We also have dispensaries that have been operating successfully for several years in Gopalgunj, East Bengal; Karmatar, Bengal; and Najibabad, United Provinces. Some dispensary work has been done at Nazareth, Tinnevelli; Tagadishpur, among the Santalis; at Panwel, near Bombay; and by Dr. Ollie Oberholzer Tornhissal in Burma.
Plants of this kind, where the medical and the evangelistic work are marching forward hand in hand, should be multiplied a hundredfold.
Just now is the time to work. A little later, it will be too late. The writer hopes to open a new station on his return from furlough, and is praying that a consecrated physician and nurses will join in the development of such a center in some needy corner of the vineyard, and that sufficient means will come in to equip and man such a dispensary.
Training Doctors and Nurses for Foreign Lands
By Newton Evans
Well Equipped Institution Favorably Located—What It Is Prepared to Do—Some Results of Its Work
ByNEWTON EVANS, M. D. President College of Medical Evangelists, Loma Linda, California
At Loma Linda, in southern California, is conducted a school for the specific purpose of educating medical evangelistic workers. The inception and growth of the work of this institution has been attended by so many encouraging experiences that no fair-minded person can doubt the workings of the hand of the Lord in the selection of the location, in the development of the educational features of the work, and in the rapid growth of the material equipment of the school and the sanitarium.
SANITARIUM HILL, LOMA LINDA
SUN PARLOR, LOMA LINDA SANITARIUM
RAILWAY STATION, LOMA LINDA, CAL.
CHAPEL ENTRANCE LOMA LINDA COLLEGE
Loma Linda was at first simply a sanitarium, but very soon instruction was received that the work of the institution was to be made strongly educational in character.
The property, consisting of a considerable tract of land, and providing a large institutional building which had been erected for sanitarium purposes, was purchased in 1905. Within a few months after the sanitarium work was begun, steps were taken to organize a medical evangelistic school in conjunction with it. In October, 1906, a state charter was secured legalizing such an institution. The first printed announcement states that the following courses are provided: (1) evangelistic-medical, (2) collegiate, (3) nurses’ training school, and (4) a course for gospel workers.
From the first, the work of the school was successful, and many students were trained, and went out into the regions beyond. The school has grown marvelously in material equipment, in teaching corps, in students, and in influence. As the work progressed, the constituency became convinced that the interests of both the sanitarium and the school would be fostered by the organization of the two as one institution, under one management. Consequently this has been and is the plan of organization.
In 1909, four years after the beginning of the work, it was deemed necessary that the school be chartered as a regular medical school, with authority to train and graduate regularly qualified physicians, who should be legally entitled to take state board examinations, and to receive license to practice as doctors of medicine. This step, therefore, was authorized by the denomination, and the charter was secured in December of that year. From the medical course proper, two classes have already been graduated, one of six members in 1914, and one of twelve members in 1915.
From the first, it has been felt that the educational work should be especially strong in the training of medical missionary nurses and medical missionary physicians. In fact, the situation has resolved itself into a plan to educate three rather distinct classes of medical missionary workers: namely: first, nurses, many of whom receive additional postgraduate work, giving unusual ability as nurses; second, many with a training making it possible for them to do much of the work of physicians in conjunction with their work as evangelists, though not receiving legal recognition as physicians, the demand for such workers being large in the great mission fields of the far East—India, China, Korea, etc.; third, regularly qualified physicians trained as medical missionaries.
The great purpose of the school, as stated at its origin, is to train evangelists. Those who have been engaged in the educational work at Loma Linda have seen clearly some of the fundamental truths which must guide and control in its work. The corner stone in its educational system is the study of the Bible. In fact, in the arrangement of the curriculum, each student is called to make the study of the Bible itself one of his regular subjects throughout each year of his entire course. Another principle which is made the basis of the teaching is a recognition of the intimate relation of science and religion, and a recognition of the harmony of spiritual laws and physical or natural laws. It is the effort of the teachers to make plain the spiritual lessons which may be drawn from natural phenomena.
In the study of remedial agents, natural methods of treatment as opposed to the use of poisonous drugs are constantly emphasized, and much time is spent in the study of hydrotherapy, mechanotherapy, and electrotherapy.
The present-day tendency of medical authorities to stress the use of so-called preventive medicine, as distinguished from simply the treatment of disease, of course is right and rational; but in the teaching here, the great importance of personal habits in the prevention or in the production of the so-called degenerative567diseases, such as diseases of the heart, the blood vessels, the brain, and the kidneys, and in the cure of diseased conditions, is emphasized, as well as the duty of society to maintain conditions that will prevent the spread of contagious and infectious diseases.
One of the important reasons for the establishment of the school at Loma Linda, especially for the training of physicians, is that the young people there may obtain their medical training. There they will have every opportunity to maintain an active religious experience, and not be exposed to the temptations that are ordinarily associated with the companionship of a young man or woman in a medical college. It is recognized that the religious life depends largely upon religious activity; and efforts are made to provide the opportunities for doing missionary work, and the student is encouraged to take advantage of every such opportunity, during the years in which the studies are carried on.
FACILITIES
The school is furnished with all the facilities necessary in the training of a well equipped physician. The laboratory instruction is all given at Loma Linda, where a very large and complete equipment is maintained. The clinical subjects are taught largely in Los Angeles, sixty-two miles from Loma Linda, where large numbers of patients are available for teaching purposes. In addition, there is a well appointed hospital at Loma Linda, and other extensive clinical opportunities.
At the present time, plans are being elaborated to supply more extensive facilities for the educational work in Los Angeles. These are to consist of a hospital and dispensary building and a commodious home for workers and students. It is planned to arrange for each nurse in training at the College of Medical Evangelists, as well as medical students and medical evangelistic students, to spend a certain amount of time in gaining practical experience in medical missionary work in the city.
One of the advantages of the Loma Linda school is that in the sanitarium work and other associated lines, it is possible for the student, if necessity demands, to earn a considerable part of the means to pay his expenses during the years that he is in the school.
SUPPLYING THE FOREIGN FIELDS
Of the many students who have been at Loma Linda, some of whom have completed the regular courses, and others of whom have spent only one or two years in the school, the large majority are engaged in medical missionary work, and many are laboring in foreign fields. The following is an incomplete summary of the workers who have gone from Loma Linda, during the short existence of the institution, to various foreign fields, and who are still laboring in those fields: Burma, 1; China, 2; Korea, 2; Philippine Islands, 1; Japan, 5; Hawaiian Islands, 2; South America, 10; Jamaica, 1; St. Thomas, 2; Mexico, 1; West Africa, 1; South Africa, 10; India, 1; totaling 39.
Persons who know the political and social conditions in the great nations of the far East—China, India, etc.—realize that just at this time the fields there are white to the harvest; and there is no question but that those workers who are fitted to do medical work combined with evangelistic work are capable of doing more effective service in these countries than any other class of workers. It is the hope and belief of those who are acquainted with the work at Loma Linda and with the needs of the great field, that within the next few years, many hundreds shall go out from this place to carry the knowledge of the gospel to the regions beyond.
