The Voyage of the “Pitcairn”

In October, 1890, the missionary ship “Pitcairn” sailed from San Francisco, California, with a company of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries to visit the island after which it was named, as well as other islands in the South Pacific. None of the first company were physicians or trained nurses, but they carried with them a medicine chest containing a box of mustard and a box of baking powder. To these were added fomentation flannels, a fountain syringe, a fever thermometer, and a few other simple appliances.SHM 284.4

One of the company, Mrs. A. J. Read, some years later related how, despite their lack of technical training, they engaged in medical missionary work in the islands. In their limited library they carried a full set of Dr. Kellogg’s works, a good “anatomy,” Dr. Beech’s “Practice,” and Clara Weeks’s textbook on nursing. Whenever a case was presented to us, she says, “we studied it up first in the ‘Anatomy,’ then in the ‘Home Hand Book,’ and so on through all the books in our collection; then when visiting the case, we would try to carry out to the best of our ability the instructions so gained.”—The Medical Missionary, February, 1895.SHM 285.1

Because of their frequent use of the fountain syringe in treating the large number of fever cases, they soon gained the reputation of being “pump doctors.”SHM 285.2