The Story of our Health Message

The School Opened

The school was opened January 14, 1878, with an enrollment of seventy-five students, and this number was soon doubled. SHM 244.1

The school course continued for twenty weeks with daily lessons and class recitations. Several studies collateral to hygiene were included in the course, such as anatomy, physiology, chemistry, physics, and mental philosophy. So thorough was the course of study given in the School of Hygiene that its certificate of study and proficiency was accepted by any medical college in the United States as a part of the regular course. Drs. Fairfield and Sprague, who had just been graduated from the Bellevue Medical College, were associated with Dr. Kellogg in the teaching. SHM 244.2

As an interesting item of comparison with the present-day cost of student expense, we note that the tuition for the twenty-week course was $25. Room and good table board were offered at the Sanitarium Students’ Club for $1.60 a week, and opportunity was offered for several active young men and women to pay the entire cost of the course by working. SHM 244.3

Some hundreds of patrons attended this excellent course of health instruction during the few years that it was offered at the sanitarium. Many of these were thereby fitted to give substantial assistance to the organization and work of the health and temperance associations that were by this time flourishing all over the country, and a number of them devoted their lives to medical missionary work. SHM 244.4

Another advance move was made in the spring of 1883, when the sanitarium made a public call for a half dozen young women to learn “nursing, massage, the use of electricity, and other branches of the practical medical department.” Good Health, April, 1883. SHM 245.1

The period of instruction was to continue three months; but the applicants, it was stated, would be required to remain from two to five years at the institution. It was asserted that such a training would qualify for a good position whereby one might gain a livelihood. That the opportunities for engaging in the nursing profession had not yet been comprehended by Seventh-day Adventist young people is evident, for only two young ladies were enrolled in this the initial effort of the sanitarium to train its own nurses. (Medical Missionary Yearbook, 1896, p. 117.) SHM 245.2