In January 1913, the Loma Linda College of Medical Evangelists (CME) Constituency held a special meeting to take advantage of the fact that the General Conference Committee was meeting in Mountain View, California, January 19 to 25. It invited members of the Canadian Conferences to participate in these deliberations. Local members of the Board urged this meeting in order to benefit from the advice and counsel of the General Conference Committee who composed a large part of CME’s Constituency.
How to provide facilities for CME to qualify for a good rating from the Americana Medical Association again confronted this group. The ownership and control of a properly equipped and managed clinical hospital and outpatient clinic would determine CME’s future success and standing.
Board Chair George Irwin followed up with some powerful words to emphasize the mounting pressure: “How to provide the proper agencies and facilities to entitle us to a proper rating and classification in the American Medical Association is the greatest problem confronting this meeting. To insure the success of this school as a medical college, will demand quick and imperative action upon the part of the Constituency and Board of Management.”
Irwin then outlined the challenge facing the institution’s future, including its relation to the system of four ratings adopted by the AMA (A+, A, B, and C). He acknowledged that these ratings were being accepted and adopted by the various state associations, and then added: “Class A+ colleges are those which are acceptable; Class A those which need improvement in certain respects, but which are otherwise acceptable; Class B, those which, under their present organization, might be acceptable by general improvement, and Class C, those which require a complete reorganization to make them acceptable. Our school is placed in the list of colleges rated Class C.”
Thus the first mention of CME’s Class C rating by the American Medical Association appears in the minutes of this Special Constituency Meeting held on January 27, 1913.
To emphasize the gravity of CME’s peril, he reported that Dean George K. Abbott, MD, had received notice from the Maryland Medical Association announcing that students from C-rated colleges would be excluded from taking their state board examination. He reported that a recent letter from Nathan Colwell, MD, the secretary of the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association, announcing that 25 or more of the state boards had made the same ruling and the probability existed that all state boards would take the same action in the near future. “These facts made it clear that some action must be taken at once by us to insure a better rating or else we will be compelled to abandon our efforts to graduate physicians who will be allowed to practice in harmony with the laws of our country.”
To complicate matters, Irwin also reported heavy financial losses and difficulties in raising funds, in spite of the fact that patronage at the Sanitarium and its earnings had been greater than at any corresponding period since the institution opened, a factor attributed to major growth. The General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists appointed a committee of “brethren” to recommend changes in the methods of operation to reduce operating expenses. Irwin reported, “While we have come to a crisis in this work, we are not discouraged or disheartened in the least.” In challenging the brethren, he reminded the Constituency that Ellen G. White, the institution’s co-founder, had advised not to talk doubt and fear, nor to look on the dark side. “What we want is courage in the Lord, and then we shall by His help and blessing make of Loma Linda just what God designs it should be.”
During the President’s Report, Wells A. Ruble, MD, reported high student confidence and morale, that most students had returned, and that they were determined to make the school a success: “In spite of the fact that there was no active progress being made in providing further necessary facilities for clinical experience, the students have been kept satisfied with the promise that these would be provided at the earliest possible date…. We feel on the whole that we are making all the progress that could be expected with the handicap under which we are laboring of not having hospital facilities sufficient for the giving of a proper education to our students.”
Although the San Bernardino County Hospital had made some clinical facilities available, it had limited availability to only two medical wards, three days a week and for only two hours. Arrangements did not include privileges in its surgical clinics because of political influences. Appealing to the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors might improve the agreement. Furthermore, the agreement limited diagnostic experience. The medical superintendent fully controlled patient management and the administration of treatments. Most importantly, such treatments differed greatly from the denominationally unique hydrotherapy treatments CME wished to demonstrate to its students. Dr. Ruble emphasized the need for CME to have its own hospital in order to teach principles embraced by the denomination and practiced in its sanitariums around the world: “There is no way of teaching physiological therapeutics without having a goodly number of patients upon whom to demonstrate…. The last two years of our medical course are the most important years because they are the years when the principles of healthful living and physiological therapeutics are emphasized and taught in detail…. If we had access to all the county hospitals in California this would not at all suffice for giving the education which must be imparted to our students.”
Eventually, fever therapy, a refined development of the Sanitarium’s long-established hydrotherapy techniques, successfully treated Undulant Fever, Gonorrhea, and Tertiary Syphilis without drugs.
To be continued...