To every Christian worker a knowledge of the science of medicine, even though it be a limited knowledge, is of much value because it enables him to present some truths in a manner more acceptable than he can otherwise present them. That person can with tact present a simple truth of anatomy, physiology, or chemistry, and lead the listener to see the relationship of this simple truth, which is readily accepted, to the great system of truth by which, if accepted, both soul and body can be transformed.
For this class of Christian workers any degree of medical education is valuable and commendable; and the more they have of such education, the better.
It is the purpose of this paper, however, to discuss the subject of education for medical missionary work from11the more definite standpoint of the medical missionary.
While any degree of acquaintance with medical truth is commendable in the ordinary Christian worker, the situation is quite different when the Christian worker poses before the public, not only as a Christian worker, but also as a Christian physician, thus bringing before the world medical truth—with its legal phases, safeguards, and restrictions—presented from its divine standpoint in sharp contrast with the same, or at least a similar, system of medical truth as ordinarily practised. Medical truth from the divine standpoint carries with it its implied obligations of obedience by reformation of life. Practised from the standpoint of purely human science, it is directed largely by professional considerations, and is shorn of many of its ethical considerations.
By profession, we are all Christian workers pledged to aid in the promulgation of that great message of truth which makes us Seventh-day Adventists. I will therefore discuss this question of medical missionary education from a denominational standpoint, and from this standpoint there can be but two reasons why any of our young people should enter upon the study of medicine.
First, for the purpose of relieving human suffering, for its own sake, as a purely humanitarian idea. This motive is a good one, and the work is commendable.
Second, for the purpose of presenting the truths of healing the body as a part of that great system of divine truth, which, when recognized and received, is also powerful and complete in the healing of the soul. In other words, it is presenting medical truth from the standpoint from which David viewed it when he said (Ps. 107:20), “He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.”
The former, the humanitarian, is doing medical work from a missionary standpoint. The latter is doing the same medical work, but is also doing evangelical work from a medical standpoint. The one has for its object the doing of medical work, and for its motive service to humanity; the other has for its object the conversion of a soul, and for its motive service to God, which also implies our fullest service to humanity.
Field of Medical Science
I trust I shall not offend the intelligence of this audience when I state the familiar fact that the field of medical science is not only large, but it is limitless, embracing as it does all departments of science that have to do with the improvement of health and the promulgation of human life.
The time was when anatomy, physiology, materia medica, and surgery constituted about all the curriculum of study for the medical student. But since the microscope and the spectroscope, the chemical, physiological, and biological laboratories, with their delicate but accurate mechanisms, have thrown a flood of light into the most interesting fields of medical research, the curriculum of studies for the medical student has grown correspondingly until to-day it presents formidable proportions.
While it is impossible for any one to become familiar with all the truths of all departments of medical science, there is a degree of knowledge of medical science so essential to the modern physician that we may speak of it as the common knowledge of all good physicians, and even from a worldly standpoint this common knowledge of the field of scientific truth may become, and should become, the knowledge of every student who expects to stand in favorable contrast with the army of competitors who have chosen medicine as a profession. If this be true from a worldly standpoint, much more should it be true from a Christian standpoint.
From a Christian point of view, it seems to me unfair that a Christian worker should essay to present to the world the work of a physician until he has devoted sufficient time and energy in preparatory study to make him so familiar with those scientific truths that constitute the common knowledge of all good physicians that he can at least creditably represent the work of a physician from a worldly standpoint.
Qualifications and Responsibilities of the Christian Medical Worker
We will all agree to the proposition, that, other things being equal, the physician who enters upon his profession as a Christian worker will, if measured by results, far outstrip any competitor who practises this same profession from any less exalted motive. When presented from the Christian standpoint, there is a power in any practical medical truth, even if it be of a most common, everyday sort, that will appeal to every human being, and will call forth as a response from him a greater effort in the line of restoration than when the same truth is presented without the divine relationship being seen; in other words, the ethical and the spiritual are potent factors in tipping the scale on the side of recovery when human life hangs in the balance. We submit, therefore, that when a denomination presents to the world a group of Christian workers in any line, the individuals in this group should at least compare favorably with a similar group of workers who are not inspired by the same exalted ideas of truth.
We can not, therefore, appreciate any sufficiently good reason why a teacher of botany in a religious school should be any less a competent botanist, why an instructor in physiology should be any less a master of the subject of physiology, than the professor who teaches these same subjects from the standpoint of human science without recognizing their relationship to divine truths. Neither can we understand why a Seventh-day Adventist physician should be any less well instructed in the truth of medical science than other physicians.
Conversion and piety are fundamental experiences in the life of any worker in God's cause. Yet we have all learned that something more is needed to qualify a worker to handle the financial interests of the Lord's work. It is the accountant as an individual that is transformed by conversion, and not the fundamental truths of bookkeeping that are changed. And the same principle is true in medical work; all that is true in medical science is just as true to a Christian worker as it is to an unconverted person.
Our profession as Christian workers does in no wise lessen our responsibilities as physicians to dig hard in the mines of truth, to study thoroughly the underlying principles and their judicious applications in our ministrations for the sick. When we have done this faithfully, we can confidently ask for a divine power in our extremity.
There should be cultivated in our medical department, from a Christian standpoint, more independence of thought, freedom of action, and fearlessness of expression. These privileges are fundamental to the development of men strong and original in the field of scientific research and able in the field of literary expression.
In view of the urgent popular demand for the further scientific development of these principles of health and temperance, and in view of the needs for greatly enriching our health and temperance literature, may we as physicians, with the light which God has given to our medical work, and with his continued guidance, so develop the work of our medical council as to meet the opportunities of the present hour.
The Range of the Physician’s Education
Every physician needs, and should secure, as part of his medical education, a hospital training and an all-round practical experience. The treatment of nervous dyspepsia, neurasthenia, neuralgia, Bright’s disease, and other chronic disorders, such as we daily meet in our sanitarium practise, by dietetic, hydropathic, and other kindred measures, is all right; there is no other method of treatment so good for those cases, no other method that will compare with it. But the student who receives the idea that proficiency in these lines alone is sufficient qualification for a physician, has too narrow a view of the great work on which he is entering, and will give occasion for many unfavorable comments and will suffer many humiliating defeats when he is compelled to face sudden emergencies, those crucial tests which come to every physician of large experience. It bodes no good for the future work of our medical department to see some of our young people entering a cheaper grade of medical schools, graduating without honors, and entering upon the career as physicians with such a preparation as fails to properly fit them to take a leading part in the discussion of such scientific questions as come before the medical societies.12
Daniel, as a reformer, presented God's truth at the court of Babylon. His experience is one we as physicians and medical students would do well to study with care. Dan. 1:17-21. The main thought and purpose of this paper is contained in those few verses. Daniel was a thorough student in all lines of wisdom and knowledge that pertained to the wise men of Babylon. When he and his companions came before the king at the end of their years of training, the king examined them and found them ten times wiser and more learned in all matters of wisdom and understanding, on all subjects on which he examined them, than all the other wise men. I wish to point out clearly that the king examined Daniel and his fellows on the various subjects of Egyptian knowledge—the same as were studied by Egyptian wise men.
Method of Education
So much for the scope of medical education. Let us give our attention for a moment to the method of education to be pursued. We can only reach a better place in our Christian experience than we now occupy by first recognizing our needs in the place where we now are.
Many young men and women of promise come to us with a statement something like this: “I want to fit myself for a missionary,” or “I think I will take a medical course so I can become a missionary or do missionary work.” I have asked several such persons what missionary work they had in mind. I had this reply a few days ago: “Well, I do not know that I exactly want to go to a foreign field. I thought I could do the most good by studying medicine and doing missionary work in the home field. If I could get a good place in one of our sanitariums, I would like it. I think that would suit me, and give me a chance to do missionary work.” You have all heard similar requests, inquiries, and replies.
We watch the career of these students through the medical colleges, and see them gradually lose their missionary desires. They are graduated as professed Christians, practise a few years, drift into the world, and we charitably consider their apostasy as due to the wicked influence of the study of medicine.
But how about the missionary students that drift from the graduating classes of our denominational schools back into the channels of commercial life? for the same defects and the same principle is seen in all our schools. Is it not remarkable that a young man can work for God in China, Korea, Fiji, or other heathen countries and maintain a bright Christian experience, and yet will lose his Christian experience in the medical schools of a civilized country?
The trouble with much of our school experience is that we are studying for missionaries instead of studying as missionaries. The missionary life is a somewhat vague thing ahead of us, instead of a living, present experience with us.
God's power can hold a missionary student in a medical school just as firm as he can hold a missionary doctor in a foreign field. In other words, we can never be missionaries by education. The fact of being a missionary is a thing quite apart from being a student in any school.
The medical missionary is a missionary with a medical training—two distinct experiences—the medical experience and the missionary experience. The medical experience is the acquisition of the knowledge of medical science by the process of mental training. The missionary experience comes only from the dedication of the life to God; therefore, that mental training which we commonly speak of as education can not make a missionary; and if education does not make a missionary, then medical education certainly can not make a medical missionary.
When, then, should our medical students become missionaries?—Certainly before they enter medical schools. Men or women who want to study how to be medical missionaries, or how to be any other kind of missionaries, need to go alone with God, and when they surrender to God, he will make them his missionaries. And as his missionaries he may want them trained in a Bible school, a cooking school, a literary school, a nurses’ school, or a medical school. But, my friends, they will enter school as missionaries, study as missionaries, be graduated as missionaries, and enter the field as missionaries. When did God accept them as missionaries?—When they forever settled the question of service for God. And God used them in the school as his missionaries to do his work of service for humanity. Such, and only such, are missionary students; such, and such only, in a medical school are medical missionary students. And those medical missionary students will recognize that their medical training is only a missionary resource from which they can draw such truths of health as may be suited to the needs of those to whom God sends them as missionaries.
The missionary medical student who does not find opportunity to pray with a classmate in medical school will need an experience with God before he is fitted to pray with the heathen in foreign lands. The medical training of our young men and women should be one continued missionary experience.
Influence of a Missionary Life in a Medical School
Some time ago I called at the Medical Department of the George Washington University, and in conversation with the dean, I learned they had two missionary scholarships. I wished to know what arrangements could be made for such of our students from our training college as desired to take the medical course. The dean frankly stated that he had decided prejudice against missionary students, as they had had quite a number, and had to expel the last one for conduct that could not be tolerated in a medical school. “But,” he said, “you people have a student here whom we are all watching, and I confess that my prejudice is growing less. Most of our missionary students have been professedly missionaries, but are all now practising medicine in the States. If you will send us bona fide missionary students that mean to lead missionary lives, we will take them in our school, and will donate half their tuition, but you must indorse them as missionary students.” One medical missionary student in that school will influence every department of the whole university.