In the early morning hours of February 18, 1902, the Battle Creek Sanitarium and Hospital burned to the ground. Nobody ever determined the cause of the fire. The medical leaders at Battle Creek never doubted that the Sanitarium would be rebuilt, but they disagreed with the leaders at the nearby Seventh-day Adventist Church headquarters on the building's proposed size, location, cost, and financing. Church leaders recommended that the Sanitarium be rebuilt, but with some limitations: “In view of the attitude of the people of Battle Creek toward the sanitarium and its work,...the new building should be erected in [Battle Creek]...that only one building be built in place of the two which were burned; and that this building should be five stories in height, not to exceed 450 feet in length.... “
But the new plans drawn up by the medical leaders, who had grown increasingly independent of church control since 1899, showed a much larger building. Seen from the front, the main building was to be 550 feet wide—nearly the length of two football fields—and was to have three rear extensions totaling an additional 500 feet. Together with its smaller buildings, it would accommodate more than 1,000 patients
The Honorable Perry F. Powers, auditor-general of the State of Michigan, described the grandeur of the new Sanitarium a few days before its dedication: “The general style of the building is that known by architects as the Italian Renaissance... The floors of the great structure make an area of five acres of marble mosaic, the construction of which was superintended by the Italian artist in that line of work who had charge of the beautiful mosaic work of the Congressional Library building at Washington, D.C... When fully completed, it will stand as one of the beautiful buildings of Michigan, creditable to the city and to the state in which it is located."
By 1906, disagreements between medical leaders and church leaders over the new Sanitarium and several other areas of controversy finally resulted in the separation of the Sanitarium from the church. The loss of the institution and some of its leaders seemed to be a severe blow to the denomination’s medical missionary work.
In October of 1910, the American Medical Missionary College merged with Illinois State University. During its 15 years, it had graduated 193 physicians. Most of these dedicated Christian physicians, as well as the nurses who graduated from AMMC, conscientiously served God in the United States and foreign fields and took their places in the reorganized medical work of the denomination, including at Loma Linda, California.
In 1914, four years after the close of the AMMC, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg tried to dissuade Dr. George Thomason, a surgeon, from joining the College of Medical Evangelists faculty in Loma Linda: “A denominational medical school such as Loma Linda must be, is an anomalous and impossible thing in the medical profession. I maintained very stoutly, as you know, that the American Medical Missionary College should be strictly non-sectarian. This principle was fought against . . . by the SDA organization. Now they have a real SDA Medical School. The conditions are nothing like as favorable as were those under which the American Medical Missionary College was carried on…. The men who are taking a medical course at Loma Linda might much better be attending a first-class medical school elsewhere than to be there.”
Then, two years later he wrote to Dr. Percy T. Magan of the “demise” of Loma Linda: “…the future of the Loma Linda medical school is absolutely hopeless. The medical profession will not tolerate such a thing as a medical college under sectarian control…. I am as certain as I am alive that the Loma Linda sanitarium will never get any higher recognition than it gets now. I am writing you these facts because I feel if you were convinced that I am right you would hesitate to ask poor men and women who have barely sufficient to supply themselves with the [necessities] of life and seldom are able to indulge in the smallest luxuries, to invest their hard earnings in an enterprise that has no future.”
The fate of the "undenominational" Battle Creek institution on one hand and the continued growth of the international Seventh-day Adventist health-care service on the other were both continued witnesses to their respective philosophies. The Battle Creek Sanitarium's three satellite institutions (two in Chicago and one in Miami) closed, one after another. The famous Sanitarium, itself, financially overextended, went into receivership in 1933. In 1938, the Sanitarium Association was reorganized under the National Bankruptcy Act. The main building was sold to the United States government and became the Percy Jones General Hospital in 1942. The Sanitarium functions continued in a much smaller building nearby until recent decades and no longer exists.
Yet the church went on to develop 725 health-care institutions in 70 countries and its own denominationally identified schools of medicine in Loma Linda, California (and with Loma Linda’s help), in Mexico, Argentina, Nigeria, Peru, and the Philippines. Next year, a new SDA school of medicine will start in Rwanda. The Loma Linda University School of Medicine has now graduated 11,156 physicians, almost 2,000 more than any other school of medicine in the Western United States. Since 1980, Loma Linda University Medical Center has been the only hospital designated by the State of California as a Level I, a regional trauma center for the four Inland Counties, providing the highest level of care available to patients in more than one-fourth of the state. Its emergency heliports have received as many as 1,627 helicopter patients in one year, and as many as 14 flights in one day. And LLUMC was recently recognized by U.S. News & World Report as the Best Hospital in the Riverside and San Bernardino metropolitan area for 2018 and 2019.