AN ARMY DOCTOR ON 
 MEDICAL OPPORTUNITIES 
 ABROAD 
 
 A personal letter from an 
 Army doctor in France to 
 an old friend and college 
 classmate in America 
 
 France, November 12, 1918. 
 My dear : 
 
 I call your attention to date above. 
 Naturally we are all still thrilling with 
 the news of yesterday — that the armis- 
 tice is an assured fact and that hostili- 
 ties have ceased. I need not attempt 
 to tell you with what joy it has been 
 received ; the whole world shares it and 
 I have no doubt that New York is just 
 as jubilant as the cities and towns over 
 here. Outside the window of the little 
 office from which I am writing, some 
 two hundred of our boys, about to be 
 evacuated from the hospital, are whist- 
 ling in a way I have not heard since 
 we arrived here some two months ago. 
 When shall we get home? is the ques- 
 tion on everybody’s lips this morning. 
 
With the end of the war and the act- 
 ual signing of the peace compacts, 
 which is now surely not far off, the 
 millions of men in our armies will be. 
 sooner or later, returned to the home- 
 land, to face the problem of their fu- 
 ture employment or activities. Among 
 them will be some thousands of medi- 
 cal men. Most of these men will re- 
 turn with their old positions and prac- 
 tices calling for them, but still foot- 
 loose. Many of them, and especially 
 the younger ones, will come back to be- 
 gin life entirely anew, free as no like 
 body of medical men in our experience 
 have ever been to choose the field of 
 their activities. All of them will re- 
 turn with wider views of life and of the 
 possibilities of their work than have 
 heretofore been common among medi- 
 cal men. The question of deepest in- 
 terest to us is how many of them can 
 be enlisted in the missionary service, 
 how many the mission societies are 
 prepared to seek and employ. 
 
 There is no doubt that if the Church 
 is ready to go forward, there is an op- 
 portunity the like of which will never, 
 within our life-time, come again. 
 Never again will there be so many 
 men, peculiarly fitted by their expe- 
 rience to listen to the call to world- 
 
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wide service and also qualified by their 
 experience to meet the call with un- 
 usual ability. The question the Church 
 must face is how far it is prepared to 
 go in enlisting medical men for work 
 in foreign fields and also what scope it 
 will seek to give to the men it secures. 
 The number of men who can be used 
 in the mission field will be determined 
 by the scope of the medical mission- 
 ary’s work. 
 
 What I want to call particularly to 
 your attention is the fact that one of 
 the results of the war will be to present 
 a problem of perhaps equal importance 
 in another field of medical effort. 
 
 One of the really startling results (to 
 me) of experience in the medical work 
 of an army is the comparative unim- 
 portance of what is done for the indi- 
 vidual in the way of treatment, either 
 medical or surgical, when weighed 
 against the tremendous influence of the 
 measures that affect the army as a 
 whole. Changes in treatment save a 
 life here and there, or perhaps a few 
 hundred lives, and it may be that these 
 few lives are of great value, but the big 
 things are the measures of preventive 
 medicine, sanitation, and hygiene, 
 which touch the whole mass of mil- 
 lions of men, and when properly em- 
 
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ployed, save tens of thousands. Let 
 me cite the anti-typhoid vaccination as 
 an example of what I mean. Typhoid 
 killed thousands in 1898 and well-nigh 
 paralyzed the army by its ravages. In 
 1918 it has played almost no part in 
 either the morbidity or mortality of the 
 army. The big question before the 
 army today is not any new measure 
 in medicine or surgery, but what shall 
 be done to stop the epidemics of in- 
 fluenza and pneumonia. The reply 
 will probably be a new form of vaccin- 
 ation. In fact, Major is now 
 
 engaged in a great effort along that 
 line. 
 
 The greatest things to be done in 
 the Orient lie along these lines — the 
 prevention of disease among the teem- 
 ing millions. The possibilities of serv- 
 ice in this field are almost unlimited. 
 The opportunities are open to qualified 
 men. Who will lay hold of these op- 
 portunities and realize the possibilities 
 of the situation? I know that to some 
 the suggestion of the idea that to equip 
 men for such service and send them 
 out as missionaries will be revolution- 
 ary. To you it cannot be new, for I 
 recall a letter from one of the men in 
 Persia pointing out the vast possibili- 
 ties inherent in this preventive work 
 
 4 
 
and asking that men qualified in bac- 
 teriology should be sent out to try to 
 realize them. 
 
 This is the work of the Church as 
 much as is the preaching of the gospel, 
 I firmly believe, and I surmise that the 
 developments of these war years have 
 opened many eyes to the power and 
 the appeal of the work done for the 
 lame, the halt, and the blind. Has 
 there been any word spoken since the 
 beginning of the war that will match 
 in power the practical demonstration 
 of the fruits of Christianity? I see great 
 things in the future in the tremendous 
 interest aroused by the war in relief 
 work, and the boundless generosity of 
 the people when a cause really reaches 
 their hearts, if these can only be laid 
 hold of and used for the work of min- 
 istry in other lands. 
 
 I need not say in closing that I 
 would not be thought to belittle the 
 preaching of the Word alone. I wish 
 only to see it given the power that 
 comes from its practical application, 
 just as nearly as possible in the way 
 in which Christ himself coupled the 
 
 Ever your friend, 
 Lieut.-Col. M. C., 
 
 Base Hospital, No. , France. 
 
 5 
 
The Foreign Mission Boards of the 
 United States are looking for a large 
 number of Christian medical men who 
 will go out especially to the countries 
 of Asia and Africa to heal the sick, to 
 promote the training of physicians in 
 these lands, to prevent disease and to 
 diminish human suffering in the name 
 and in the spirit of Christ, and to help 
 to introduce the principles of sanita- 
 tion, hygiene, and human sympathy 
 which prevail in a Christian civiliza- 
 tion. Any man in the army or navy, 
 who is interested may learn of these 
 opportunities from the foreign mission 
 board of the Christian denomination to 
 which he belongs, and any chaplain or 
 Y. M. C. A. secretary will be glad to 
 put him in communication with the 
 missionary agencies. 
 
 Published for the National War Work 
 Council of Young Men’s Christian Associa- 
 tions, by Association Press, 347 Madison 
 Avenue, New York. 
 
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