Letters and Manuscripts — Volume 23 (1908)

Lt 91, 1908

Burden, J. A.

St. Helena, California

March 24, 1908

Previously unpublished.

Dear Brother Burden:

I have had to call to mind the more direct words and the plans that should be followed. We have now to become perfectly united in plans and ways in Southern California. Years are not to be consumed in plans of physicians and in receiving diplomas or credentials. We are to make our schools near our sanitariums. And the education must be through thoroughly competent physicians and the treatments carried out by educated nurses. 23LtMs, Lt 91, 1908, par. 1

You need a physician who is competent to stand as physician-in-chief to carry the work in medical lines and a lady, as Doctor White, to be physician-in-chief to attend to the women’s necessities. A gentleman physician is needed to attend to the gentlemen and perform operations; but there is to be an order established in all our sanitariums that a gentleman physician should not attend the cases of childbirth, and the delicate diseases that women are subject to are not to be under the examinations of men doctors. This is out of the Lord’s order. There should be in our sanitariums a lady physician and her helper nurses to look after the confinement cases, and the lady physician is chief in this life and can call on her nurses and give them lessons in regard to the particular diseases of women. 23LtMs, Lt 91, 1908, par. 2

[Letter incomplete.]