A Brief Survey of the SDA Health Care Services in China
(1903-2003)
Samuel C.S. Young, Ph.D
Two years after the Boxers killed over 200 western missionaries and more than 20,000 Chinese Christians in a big riot in 1900, and the joint army of eight western powers, including Japan, killed many more and burned the imperial summer palace in Beijing.
The first General Conference sent missionaries arrived in China, and soon they started the educational and medical work in spite of the dangers they faced.
You must understand that 1903, only 40 years after the General Conference was organized, the membership of SDA’s in North America was only about 76,000.
China was then in the Ching dynasty, an Emperor was sitting on the throne in the Forbidden City. Most girls bound their feet and were not allowed to be in the same school with boys.
Some people still believed that the western missionaries killed babies in orphanages and gouged their eyes to make medicines. In America, the first airplane had not flown its first 120 ft. The J C Penney Co. had not been opened.
The model T Fords were in its infancy. And electricity was confined only to a few major cities. It took weeks for the slow boat to go across the Pacific Ocean to reach the other side.
(Even in 1957, 54 years later, when I took such a boat ride, the much faster S S President Cleveland took 18 long days and nights for a trip from Hong Kong to San Francisco.)
The Loma Linda University now world famous, was not yet established until three years later (in 1905). But China was an entirely different world to which our medical missionaries entered.
Drs. Harry and Maude Miller, Drs. A C and Bertha Selmon, Nurses Charlotte Simpson and Carrie Erickson, must have been shocked by the changes they experienced.
Harry and Maude Miller at the time of their wedding in 1902.
AC & Bertha Selmon
The Millers adopted Chinese dress soon after their arrival in China in 1903. Maude died two years later.
They were to put on the Ching Dynasty dresses; for men, they shaved their forehead, put on pigtails or Biantzeon the head, and all wore the Quah Tze, the ancestor of Chang San (the long gown).
There was no electricity in Henan, where they went, no running water, no gas for heating or cooking, no refrigerator, no microwave, of course no TV or Radio, things we take for granted as every day basic necessities.
In addition, they had to learn to speak the local dialect, cooked with locally available food supplies, much different from what they used to cook at home.
The Henan Sign of the Times Pub. Assoc.
With no appropriations from the General Conference they could only manage to run a couple of clinics. Even though willing and anxious, the GC leaders just had no money to pay for the support of these medical missionaries.
They had to work for one full year before saving enough for their passages and the first year living expenses. So hospitals would have to wait, they came much later.
Passport used during this era in China.
In 1902 the tithe for the whole North America was only $643,748 but the GC had to support the work not only in NA with 553 ministers, but the whole world.
Four years later, in 1906 Dr. Law Keem, a medical doctor born in Guangzhou (Canton) but educated in the United States, responding to an article on the Review and Herald written by B H Wilber, one of the early missionaries to South China, went home to join the mission work.
Soon a small hospital opened its door at Fatsan, a town about 10 miles west of Guangzhou. The following are a list of the 20 hospitals the SDA’s opened in China from 1908 to 1971.