How Can Health Reform Be Taught With the Old-Time Enthusiasm?
By William C. White
With many of our ministers there is a wisdom and power in their work of teaching temperance and hygiene that leads their converts to be intelligent and loyal health reformers. How can this good work be made more general? What can our physicians and nurses do to strengthen the hands of the ministers and Bible workers? There needs to be a clearer understanding among us as to what health reform really is. What does loyalty to this part of our work really demand from us? There needs to be a better understanding as to how the health and temperance principles can be most successfully taught, (a) by the pioneers who are carrying the message into new territory; (b) by our church-school teachers and leaders of Missionary Volunteer societies, to the children and youth; (c) by the true medical missionary to the members of our churches who need further instruction. There needs to be provided a more complete literature on the various phases of temperance and health reform, (a) for the use of our church-schools and Missionary Volunteer societies; (b) for church-members who wish, by example and by word of mouth, to teach the principles to their friends and neighbors; (c) as pioneer literature to call the attention of the world to the value of these principles. Compare the wealth of literature we have on the Sabbath question, the second advent, the prophecies, and the immortality question, and the perfect adaptation of this literature to the various needs of the field, with the poverty and lack of symmetry of our health literature. Many times physicians have asked me why it is that our publishing houses do not issue more health literature. In reply I have asked why our medical men do not furnish the manuscripts for the books that are needed. Study the painstaking effort of the Sabbath-school Department in its perfect organization, its instruction to officers, and its publication of a journal for the help of its teachers, and note the satisfactory results. There needs to be a renewal of the “forward movement,” a revival of the “Christian Help work,” an awakening of all our people to the fact that in our temperance and health reform principles we have a very precious talent that should be conscientiously put to use for the Master. There needs to be a waking up of both our local and union conference medical departments to their responsibilities, and a more earnest, persevering work done by those chosen to bear responsibilities in these departments. There needs to be organized and systematically conducted a work in behalf of all our graduate nurses that will be as skilfully and faithfully carried forward as is the work for the training and encouragement of church-school teachers and the work for the organization and furtherance of our Missionary Volunteer societies. Year by year, at great expense, we train a splendid army of nurses, and then we let a large number of them drift away into employments where they do not count as active workers for Christ. True, it is not so easy to gather together the nurses for convention work as it is to assemble the teachers or the canvassers; but the difficulties of this work should not deter us from doing what we can to encourage the nurses, and to lead them on, step by step, to the accomplishment of the great work that they are fitted to do in building up the kingdom of the Master. We should systematically work for them by correspondence, by personal visits, and by conventions wherever possible. There needs to be more heed given to the oft-repeated counsels that our ministers should study the principles of hygiene and simple nursing, so that they can work intelligently for the sick in connection with their gospel ministry. There needs to be a more earnest effort to encourage young physicians and nurses to unite their labors with the gospel ministers, who are holding series of meetings in tents and halls, that they may be efficient helpers, and at the same time be learning to become competent medical evangelists. There needs to be a greater effort on the part of our conferences and sanitariums to send out groups of trained nurses to sell health literature, and to conduct schools of health in many places. When we have done our very best to strengthen the medical work by the conscientious use of every talent we possess, then we shall find among us an enthusiasm, born of the Spirit of God, that will exceed anything known either in the olden times or in the present.