ADVENTIST HERITAGE

 

 

By Raymond S. Moore 

 

One of the most skilled surgeons in the world, Dr. Harry W. Miller (1879-1977) had a distinguished 58-year career of service. In China he treated high government officials, the wealthy, and the poor alike. During World War I he served as medical superintendent of Washington Sanitarium (now Washington Adventist Hospital), returning to China in 1925. He worked with soybeans, creating products that were flavorful and practical—his crowning accomplishment was tasty, affordable, nutritious soy milk, which saved the lives of many Chinese babies. In 1956 Miller received the Blue Star of China, the country’s highest award, from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. In his 90s Miller continued as a consultant to the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He still made frequent trips to eastern Asia,2 though he had said he would not! 

 

D

BLENDING IN: Soon after their arrival in China, Harry and Maude Miller pose in the dress of those they came to serve. r. Miller was walking with Stella Houser, one of his older students, when she inquired about his plans for the future. As a former secretary to the Foreign Mission Board of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, she was constantly on the lookout for possible missionaries.

 

“I think I’ll continue with surgery and teaching,” he answered. “Why?”

 

“I think it would be a wonderful thing if you and your wife would go to China,” she said earnestly.

 

Miller had thought vaguely of an excursion to Mexico or Australia sometime, but China had never entered his mind. Her suggestion followed him wherever he went. He talked it over casually with his wife, Maude. Suddenly questions tumbled over one another. Was there a divine plan behind all of this? What was China really like? They knew only that China had two cities, Peking and Shanghai, and that it produced Chinese laundrymen. 

 

Getting Serious About Service 

Miller talked to his former roommate Arthur Selmon, whose fiancée, Bertha, was also a physician. He and Bertha volunteered to go, [as well as] two nurses. The idea was snowballing. [It] was one thing to decide to go to China, and quite another to get there. None of the group had more than a few cents apiece.

 

Stella quickly passed the word on to the secretary of the mission board. The sad news came back: “the board has no funds to send you.” If they were to go, they would have to find their own way, their own money, their own transportation.

 

China became the subject of much study. Tackling it like a seventh-grade social-studies class, they wrote letters to missionaries in China. They bought a mission book entitled Chinese Characteristics and studied about 
J. Hudson Taylor, pioneer Methodist missionary. Even though they were going as doctors, they would need Christian literature. They would have to print it themselves. The more they learned about Chinese characters and the complex language, the more prohibitive the task became. The undertaking was going to require more perseverance and sacrifice than they had anticipated. They spent a lot of time on their knees, [wanting] to be certain that they were on the right track. 

 

Making a Choice 

A CAREER OF CARING: Miller and his wife, Maude, made their maiden voyage to China on the Empress of India. When Dr. John Harvey Kellogg learned of their plans, he determined to dissuade them. There were, he said, high stations awaiting them in a number of medical schools and hospitals. He was persuasive, but the needs of China stood out in stark relief against the attractive alternative. [The] decision to part with Dr. Kellogg [was] a decision clouded with occasional forebodings about the future in a country that had been a graveyard for many well-meaning missionaries before them. 

 

Traveling an Ocean Away 

A number of people promised financial help, and the missionaries-to-be felt reassured by unmistakable answers to their prayers. The elements of the puzzle began to fit into place. Miller’s home conference of Ohio, and the Iowa Conference from which Selmon came, agreed to pay their transportation and to contribute a small allowance for the first year—about seven dollars a week for each family. Out of this they would pay the nurses. The conferences also bestowed ministerial credentials and sent the dedicated little band on its way, ordained to the medical ministry of China.

 

They soon found that the cheapest ocean transportation available was third-class—actually steerage—on the Canadian Pacific’s Empress of India. It cost precisely one hundred dollars apiece. That voyage remains a vivid memory in Dr. Miller’s mind: “On the afternoon of October 3, 1903, as the Empress moved away from the pier and down Puget Sound, we moved up to the deck, confident in the beginning of our great adventure. We paraded up and down the ship assuring each other that we would all be good sailors. None of us felt the least bit sick. [But] we were still in inland waters, level and friendly as a garden pond. Except for the vibration of the engines there was little sense of motion.

 

Throughout his career Miller served in hospitals and clinics around the world. “We made a brief stop at Victoria and then headed out into the deep, cocky as ever. By this time we were all in bed, and the boat was beginning to rock. If it had just rocked one way it wouldn’t have been so bad, but it was rocking all ways and always. A terrible sensation came over me. Selmon and I were in the same airtight cabin, and the four women in another. Soon we were so sick that neither of us could even get up to check on the women.

 

“‘Surely this will let up,’ we comforted one another. But it only became worse. The sicker we became, the more dehydrated we were because we couldn’t eat or drink a thing. Nor could we sit up or even get out of the cabin. And I, the cockiest one, was the worst of all. There were no effective seasickness remedies in those days.

 

“Finally, after four days and nights of lying there in agony, I consented to go up to the deck. With unspeakable weakness I half crawled, and was half lifted, up to the deck, where I sprawled like [a drunk]. The fresh ocean air was exhilarating and the ship’s personnel attentive and kind, but I didn’t leave the cabin or deck chair for the next nine days, except for one excursion, before arriving at Yokohama. My first impression of that oriental city was that all of its streets and buildings were rocking up and down, and I walked gingerly to meet its movements.”

 

One Vow Unfulfilled Points to a Lifetime of Service 

Dr. Miller still remembers the vow he made: “I’m going to China and stay there all my life. I’m never going back to America again. I’ll die before going through a siege of seasickness like that.”

 

But Harry Miller was no seer. In the future he would complete scores of ocean crossings by ship and airplane. His medical ministry was to carry him into all parts of the United States and to more than fifty nations of the world in one of the widest-ranging and most significant medical practices in history. 

 

² Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, Commentary Reference Series, vol. 11, pp. 71, 72. Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1996.