Heritage Snapshot: Part 138

Loma Linda University has a good kind of pride in the noteworthy accomplishments of its alumni. Some have made major contributions to world medicine by adding to the sum of medical knowledge through their research and publishing in the scientific literature. Others have developed facilities, equipment, and procedures that have benefited mankind in many different ways and thus contributed to the international reputation of their alma mater. But most of Loma Linda University School of Medicine’s early graduates worked behind the scenes, on “the front lines” as family doctors, far from the limelight, without thought of praise or acclamation. Much of their work is known only to their patients, their families, and to God. Some became medical missionaries overseas and in the United States. They are unsung heroes. Earl C. Mercill, Jr., MD (College of Medical Evangelists Class of 1950), represents thousands of Loma Linda graduates who brightened their corners of the world. And his wife Mariane Mercill, RN (CME Class of 1949) represents the spouses who became full partners in a ministry of healing that has encircled the globe. Like many of Loma Linda’s graduates, Earl was the only one in his family to become interested in the practice of medicine. He was born and reared in Seattle, Washington, where his parents became Seventh-day Adventists when he was about 10. In 1942, at the age of 18, he graduated from high school from the nearby Auburn Academy. From an early age Earl wanted to become a physician. Although he doesn’t know where the name came from, his family called him Dr. Schlinkist. As a teenager he worked for Arthur H. Grauman, MD (CME Class of 1925), a Seattle obstetrician and gynecologist, cleaning his home and looking after his children. Dr. Grauman spoke at Friday night young people’s meetings on medical history and new developments in the practice of medicine and became young Earl’s hero. Those experiences increased his interest. After Earl’s graduation from Auburn Academy, World War II threatened to derail his ambition to become a physician. He moved to Southern California and enrolled in Wooster’s X-ray and Lab School in San Gabriel. When he wasn’t drafted, in the fall of 1943, he enrolled at what is now La Sierra University. After additional premed studies at the University of Washington, he graduated from Walla Walla College in 1945. In the meantime, Earl had applied to the College of Medical Evangelists in Loma Linda, where he started medical school in the fall of 1945. During his medical education Earl noticed a beautiful nursing student in the school cafeteria. Mariane Hollingsead became the girl of his dreams, and on July 1, 1947, between his sophomore and junior years in medical school, the two were married in Burden Hall by College Church Pastor Robert Olsen. For clinical experience in those days, medical students moved to Los Angeles for their junior and senior years. The newlyweds lived in a one-room apartment they rented for $20 a month. Their “kitchen sink” was a bucket just outside the back door. About four times a year, Earl sold his blood for $25 a pint in order to buy Mariane a Singer sewing machine. Earl completed his medical studies in 1949, and graduated from CME in the Loma Linda Bowl on June 12, 1949. In those days student physicians received their MD degrees after an additional year of internship. Dr. Mercill completed his internship at Glendale Sanitarium and Hospital in 1950 and thus is considered to be a member of the Class of 1950. Dr. Mercill was always a family physician. With the exception of a two-year stint in 1954 and 1955 as a Captain in the United States Air Force at Mineral Wells, Texas, for the first 16 years of his career, he practiced in Compton, Bakersfield, and Arvin, California. But most of his career he spent as the only physician in a small, isolated, low-income Northern California lumber mill and logging community. Hayfork, California, is in a picturesque remote valley in Trinity County, high in the Klamath Mountains, between Redding, California, and the Pacific Ocean. The Mercills moved there in 1966 in order to rear their children in a more rural environment. In addition to their own four children they adopted or were foster parents to four more, simply because the kids needed a mother and a daddy and brothers and sisters. Even their private lives became a ministry. While in the Air Force most of Dr. Mercill’s practice consisted of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He stopped the routine practice of Obstetrics in his Hayfork practice in 1971 because of the 45-minute drive to the nearest hospital in Weaverville, over a curving mountain road. He didn’t want to be away from town for the 20 hours some women are in labor. But he continued to deliver babies in his office when the delivery was imminent or during inclement weather during long snowy and wet winters. On occasion he delivered a baby by flashlight or lantern. During his career he delivered about 2,500 babies, including about 100 of Hayfork’s residents. Many of the injuries he treated routinely resulted from lumber mill accidents. He surgically treated lacerations with such precision and care that his stitches hardly left a scar. He never turned anyone away because of financial difficulties or lack of insurance. Often local ambulance volunteers asked Dr. Mercill to accompany them to serious logging accidents in the forest. Sometimes he even accompanied a rescue helicopter to Hyampom, California, 24 miles from Hayfork, a “sort of end-of-the-world place with a one-way road into it.” During one incident, because of bad weather and poor visibility, the helicopter was forced to fly to the accident site down the Hayfork Creek at the bottom of a narrow canyon; a scary experience.