Heritage Snapshot: Part 134

In 1919 Dr. Iner Ritchie started teaching anatomy at CME. In 1920, his adoptive parents sold their Corona home and bought Snug Harbor, a 24-room Loma Linda mansion designed and built in 1895 by Colonel J. T. Ritchie, William Shanon Ritchie’s uncle. Colonel Ritchie had built the Casa Loma Hotel in Redlands as well as the redwood home for Captain Lewis Smith Davis. Davis, a retired New York sea captain and shipping magnate named his Victorian-era retirement home “Snug Harbor.” The elder Ritchies gave Iner and his wife Inelda a nearby lot on Prospect Avenue where they built a small home and lived for 7 years. Iner’s move to Calexico in 1926 opened doors of service to the needy of Mexico that would span decades. He was so well respected, even Mexican officials called him over the border to care for them. In 1929, because of his connections with Governor Rodrigues, Iner became one of the few American physicians to be granted a license to practice medicine in Mexico. On May 1, 1934, Dr. Ritchie left a successful and growing family practice and, with a great financial loss, answered a call from the Mexican Union Mission Committee of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to serve at its Tacubaya Clinic in Mexico City. He soon traveled into the tropical areas of Southern Mexico, toward the Guatemalan border, to treat the native population. He sometimes traveled by horseback, boat, and dugout canoe to reach the primitive peoples who had no other access to medical care, ignoring the ever-present peril of accident and sickness. He almost drowned twice. He not only addressed their acute medical needs, but also attempted to teach them techniques of sanitation and preventive medicine—how to avoid sickness. In a letter dated March 19, 1935, Dr. Ritchie reported to his adoptive mother in Loma Linda a meaningful dream he had experienced after reading the words of Jesus to “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” In the dream he stood in the middle of a pond. He looked at the edges of the pond and found that they formed the shape of Mexico. “I was about the middle where Mexico City is located…,” he wrote. The pond was full of fish, both large and small, which he caught with his bare hands. He understood that the dream was God’s way of confirming his medical missionary work in Mexico. In the meantime, by 1935 he had taught almost 40 “workers” to care for the sick, some of whom could expand his work in the jungles of Southern Mexico. Through competent and compassionate service he envisioned building lasting friendships with the leaders of Mexico that eventually would open every state to graduates of CME. But, unfortunately, in 1936 a heart attack cut short Dr. Ritchie’s work in Mexico City. Continuing bouts of angina pain while living at high altitude had taken its toll. His family returned to Loma Linda, and he recuperated that spring and summer at Dr. T. Gordon Reynolds’ hospital and school of nursing in the northern state of Sonora. As he regained his strength, in the fall of 1936 Iner returned to Riverside and established a family practice in his home on Seventh Street. Because patients pounded on the door at all hours of the night, this arrangement created numerous family stresses. However, because many of his earlier patients still lived nearby, his practice succeeded. Later he built the Monterrey Medical Clinic on what is now Brockton Avenue. Even though he had lived and worked in Mexico for only two years, he never forgot his dream and the needs he had seen there, especially the hardships the Indians suffered in the backcountry. Though frail, he began making regular excursions into Mexico, conducting medical clinics until 1947 when he expanded his personal outreach program in a most dramatic way. With the help of Mr. Jerry L. Pettis, he organized Liga Mexico-Pan-Americana Medico Educational, a non-profit corporation that offered opportunities of service to physicians, nurses, public health workers, and health educators. “Liga,” as it became known, established clinics in the Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja. With financial backing from his friend, cereal magnate W. K. Kellogg, Dr. Ritchie built a hospital in Montemorelos, Nuevo Leon. Iner’s son, Iner William Ritchie, MD (CME class of 1941) joined him in his missionary endeavors. Iner Sheld-Ritchie suffered a fatal heart attack on Oct. 24, 1949, at age 64. But his influence continues. His son, referred to by his adoptive grandmother as “Iner William,” became a professor at Loma Linda University and continued leading Liga. The hospital established in Nuevo Leon eventually became the home of the third Seventh-day Adventist School of Medicine at Montemorelos University. Liga is now known as “The Flying Doctors of Mercy.” Private planes from California, Arizona, and Nevada now transport volunteer medical personnel into the remote areas served decades earlier by Iner and his son. Sometimes helicopters take medics to where the Ritchie doctors arrived by horseback and dugout canoe so many years ago. This work is a living memorial to a man who remembered the selfless care given to his own mother during her untimely death, a man who, with the help of God, determined to do what he could to improve the lives of some of the world’s most needy people. Iner Sheld-Ritchie exemplified the mission of CME. His son, Iner William Ritchie, not only continued his father’s medical missionary program in Mexico by leading Liga, but in 1950, purchased Snug Harbor to keep it in the family. “The Ritchie Mansion,” as it is known today, is located on Ritchie Circle in Loma Linda, and is now well over 100 years old. It was purchased in 1995 by Loma Linda University Medical Center and, after being refurbished, has become an inn, a home away from home, for outpatients of the James M. Slater, MD Proton Treatment and Research Center.