The Story of our Health Message

Mrs. White’s Encouragement

At the time these two statements were written in letters Mrs. White had just completed and sent to the printers the manuscript for Testimonies for the Church, Volume VII. Her burden for the medical missionary work of the denomination at this time is indicated by the fact that more than one fourth of the instruction in this volume was devoted to sanitarium, restaurant, and health food work. This was at the time when, following the fire of 1902, the Battle Creek Sanitarium was being rebuilt. In connection with the call for a strong medical work in southern California, the instruction so often given in former years was repeated—there should be, not one large institution, but smaller plants in many places. Of this she wrote: SHM 335.3

“Medical missionary work in southern California is not to be carried forward by the establishment of one mammoth institution. ... As soon as possible, sanitariums are to be established in different places in southern California. Let a beginning be made in several places.”—Testimonies for the Church 7:96, 97. SHM 336.1

Two years prior to this (in 1900) Mrs. White had returned from Australia. While there she had been led to give constant counsel regarding educational work and how it should be conducted, in an effort to build up the Avondale School as an institution that should be a model to others, and that would point the way to principles that had been but imperfectly adopted by other of our denominational schools. Now, in God’s providence, it seems that for a period of seven or eight years she was to be divinely led in an endeavor to guide in the working out in southern California of the principles upon which Seventh-day Adventist sanitariums should be conducted. Early counsels regarding the purposes of these institutions were repeated, and added instruction was given calculated to guard against some of the mistakes that had marred the work in the past. There was decided counsel, not that the work was to be either interdenominational or undenominational, but to the contrary: SHM 336.2