The Madison institution not only gave key personnel to Loma Linda, but also means that might rightfully have been Madison’s. Mrs. Josephine Gotzian, one of Madison’s founders and a member of its Board of Trustees, gave to the Loma Linda College of Medical Evangelists (CME) $10,000 toward the purchase of land on which to build the White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles. The money had been promised to Madison. Later when Dr. Magan needed another financial boost, Mrs. Lida Scott, a member of the Madison faculty and Board for many years, gave $30,000 to help build the White Memorial Hospital. Eventually, Madison’s gifts to CME during a critical time in its history totaled $50,000.
Over the years Loma Linda generously repaid these Madison gifts by returning to the Southern United States hundreds of physicians, many of whom had taken their premedical training at Madison College. By 1952, 208 CME graduates worked in the South, almost all of them in self-supporting work. And Loma Linda-trained nurses, dietitians, and technicians joined them.
To demonstrate CME’s appreciation Dr. Magan wrote to Madison, “I thought you would be pleased to know that we are naming one of our cottages the ‘Madison Cottage’. In the early and hard days here at White Memorial Hospital the Madison School and the Madison family stood by us most generously both in money and in people, and this is a little token of our gratitude.”
After many years at CME Magan visited interns, graduates in residencies, or alumni who were in practice in every state of the nation, and affectionately called them “my boys and girls.” According to Albert Dittes, author of Profiles of Madison College Pioneers, Magan’s encouragement of many CME graduates to work in the Southern United States resulted in the Southern Union Conference eventually becoming the largest, richest union in the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
In 1915, Magan became the dean of CME’s Los Angeles Division and in 1928 followed Evans as its president. Between 1914 and 1942, under the Evans and Magan administrations, CME developed from a struggling school of medicine with virtually no rating to a Class A medical school with faculty and students numbering in the hundreds. In honor of these two Loma Linda giants, CME named its pathology building Newton Evans Hall and Loma Linda University named its administration building Percy T. Magan Hall.
On January 20, 1915, the CME Board of Trustees voted to send Doctors Evans, Magan, and Wells A. Ruble to represent CME to the Council on Medical Education of the American Medical Association, at its meeting to be held in Chicago in February. Magan was not yet officially "connected" with CME. While there, however, Magan started friendships in the political circles of the AMA which eventually became extremely valuable in future contacts.
In the meantime, in order to focus more denominational attention on CME, the Board voted on January 30, 1915, to invite the North American Division Conference to hold its medical convention in Loma Linda, March 19 to 23. CME’s Constituency Meeting followed on March 24, during which Dr. Evans delivered the President’s Report. He stated that the number of students who entered the first year of medical school that year was much smaller than any of the first year classes in the past. He believed that the increase in entrance requirements had reduced the class size.
Because the CME faculty had arranged its medical school curriculum to span five years, each student spent four years at Loma Linda and the fifth year in Los Angeles. This schedule made it necessary to maintain a corps of teachers both in Loma Linda and in Los Angeles. The entire number of teachers numbered 56. Of these, 20 were in Loma Linda and 13 in Los Angeles. The remainder were special lecturers.
Teaching privileges in CME’s woefully inadequate clinical division continued only by special arrangements with physicians who had regular appointments on the clinical staff at the Los Angeles County Hospital. The 28 patients a day treated at CME’s Los Angeles outpatient dispensary did not meet the 100 average required by the Council on Medical Education.
The Loma Linda Hospital, designed to serve 70 patients, accommodated only 12 to 26. President Evans stated that CME should make “strong efforts to fill this hospital with patients.” On the other hand, he reported that CME’s well-equipped laboratories complemented a good working library of more than 10,000 volumes, including the better scientific medical journals. He reported that the San Bernardino County Hospital provided clinical experience for CME students, and that recent plans to increase the size of that hospital would improve their educational opportunities. The expanded facility now had an average daily census of 150 patients, and plans had been made for building a new $150,000 hospital.
Dr. Evans continued: “We feel that the school has been making definite progress in all lines. There is a feeling of unity and enthusiasm on the part of all the teachers and an improvement in the spiritual condition and consecration of the student body is evident.
He then appealed for a strengthening of CME by building up the work of the new Loma Linda Hospital and adding teachers to the laboratory staff. He indicated that at least one year of clinical teaching should be provided at Loma Linda, and that the Loma Linda teaching faculty must be strengthened significantly.
To be continued…
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