Another Dispensary in Chicago

After two years another mission dispensary was started in the southern part of Chicago. Through these two institutions and the nurses’ visits to homes, more than 20,000 people annually were soon receiving medical attention. Thus, though the enterprise had grown with no thought of the ultimate result, it was now found that it was of sufficient size to furnish the clinical practice necessary for a medical college.SHM 277.5

Having followed briefly this development in Chicago, we turn our attention again to the training of the students who offered themselves for medical missionary service as physicians.SHM 278.1

The great majority of the medical students in the first class of about twenty, whom we found living in the Christian atmosphere of the home at Ann Arbor, Michigan, maintained their loyalty to the principles of Christian reform. Nevertheless there was a growing anxiety among the leaders of the medical missionary work as it became evident that some in later classes, influenced by their worldly associations and the teachings of non-Christian professors, were losing the ideals which had led them to enter upon the medical course.SHM 278.2

From far-off Australia Mrs. White was sending timely words of caution and appeal, pointing out anew and with added emphasis the dangers connected with attendance at worldly universities. “In no time in your life,” she wrote to one of the medical students, “have you been more critically placed than you are while prosecuting your medical studies in Ann Arbor.” And she besought him to “cling to the wisdom which is revealed to you in the Word of God, for it will bind you, if you obey its teachings, to the throne of God.”—E. G. White Letter 17a, 1893. (Written October 2, 1893.)SHM 278.3