UNDER the heading, "Medical Missionary Work in Roman Catholic Countries," in the Missionary Review, Rev. Levi B. Salmaus, M.D., of Guanajuato, Mexico, writes:—
"In part through the encouragement furnished by our work here, three sister denominations have entered this field with medical missionary work. First came the Seventh-day Adventists. Almost from the very start they employed a force of twelve or fourteen Americans as doctors, nurses, teachers, and so forth. Their work was then supported with funds from the United States. They have pressed on from dispensary and visiting work, to the construction of a sanitarium in Guadalajara, upon which they have spent thus far seventy-eight thousand dollars, and their work has come to be mostly self-supporting. The Methodist Episcopal Church South in San Luis Potosi have also been carrying on dispensary work for about two years, and have a five-thousand-dollar hospital now in operation. The United Presbyterian Church have had their first medical missionary in this country for nearly a year, and she is beginning to get such use of the language as to enable her to put their work into a more formal shape; thus far she has had to work through interpreters, and has been really but preparing for the greater work which she will soon undertake in some city yet to be selected. . . . How is it that some still insist that in the mission field a doctor must not be a preacher, and that a preacher must not be a healer of the body? Christ associated the two operations in one person when used for convincing and converting unbelievers. All this shows that the church in our day is yet in uncertainty and confusion about the nature and uses of this great 'gift.' In our times the usual way out of such dilemmas seems to be discussion. May it come and do its work quickly, that we may see the blessed fruits of a perfectly understood and faithfully used 'gift' of God for reaching all hardened unbelievers, whether in Catholic countries, or pagan, or in our own city slums."
