The Story of our Health Message

Counsel From Heaven

At this crisis in the medical missionary work among Seventh-day Adventists, Mrs. White passed from California through Michigan on her way to Europe. So concerned was she over the critical situation in the sanitarium at Battle Creek that before sailing she wrote out a document setting forth the urgent need for the training of consecrated youth as nurses and physicians. She insisted on the utmost care in choosing the youth for medical training and urged the importance of safeguarding the spiritual interests of those who should be encouraged to enter the medical colleges of the world. This document was printed in a forty-four-page pamphlet entitled “Counsels to Physicians and Medical Students.” In outlining the perils connected with a sojourn in a medical college as usually conducted, she spoke of the great need for “godly physicians,” “men who have high and pure and holy principles.” She had “been shown,” she said, “young men” who had entered upon the medical course, intending to do right, and to “maintain their Christian principles,” but who had, notwithstanding their good resolutions, “come forth from their student life” “less fitted in many respects for the kind of work necessary for them to do than before they entered college.” SHM 254.1

Despite the great need for physicians, however, she was led to question the wisdom of the plan “of sending young men to a medical college to learn to treat the sick,” where they were “brought in contact with every class of minds,” and into companionship with “skeptics, infidels, and the profligate.” There were but few, she lamented, who came forth “like Joseph and Daniel, uncorrupted, firm as a rock to principle.” SHM 254.2

She reminded the young graduates that they should consider their education only just begun. They were not to feel themselves on an equality with physicians of experience. On the contrary they were “by thoughtfulness and caretaking” to “earn a reputation and gain the hearts of those whom they serve.” (E. G. White Manuscript 4a, 1885.) SHM 254.3

Four years more passed; and, despite the appeals made by the sanitarium staff and by Mrs. White, only a very few availed themselves of the opportunities and the inducements offered by those who realized the need for Christian physicians. A notice appearing in the Review and Herald stated: SHM 255.1

“The increasing demand for physicians of both sexes who have been thoroughly trained in all branches of medical science, and especially in the principles maintained and the methods employed at the sanitarium, has induced the stockholders and managers of the sanitarium to offer special inducements to young men and women of suitable age, ability, and acquirements to engage in this branch of the work.”—The Review and Herald, November 12, 1889. SHM 255.2