Heritage Snapshot Part 205: Stanley G. Sturges MD

LOMA LINDA >> He lived and worked high in the foothills of the show-covered Himalayas, earth’s tallest mountain chain. He was an All-American athlete, a mechanic, musician, and builder. He was “Mister America” and the only physician available to half a million Nepalese, one of the most isolated cultures in the world. He built his own hospital along the border between Nepal and the People’s Republic of China, just a few miles from the trail-head to Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. His experience as a missionary physician in Nepal tapped all of his physical abilities and reserves, scientific knowledge, manual skills and sensitivities. His athletic vitality sustained exhausting treks into distant Himalayan villages. His linguistic skills broke down social and cultural barriers. His knowledge of construction provided a hospital in which to practice his profession. His music filled his home during lonely times when isolation from family and professional peers became a reality. In 1961, The United States Junior Chamber of Commerce recognized Stanley G. Sturges, M.D., (Loma Linda College of Medical Evangelists class of 1955) as one of America’s Ten Outstanding Young Men on January 20, 1961 in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, with national press, radio and television coverage. Sturges and his wife Raylene Duncan Sturges, R.N. went to Nepal in 1957, just two years after his graduation from medical school. Their first home was a two-room, 15 feet square, two-story structure with no stairway. They had to use an outside ladder to access the top floor. The six-feet-four-inch physician often bruised his forehead while entering low doorways during house calls for his short patients. Sturges and his wife were able representatives of their country and church, prime examples of missionaries who go into an area of the world previously unentered. First, Sturges had to build his own hospital. Without the use of modern tools, not even a wheelbarrow, Sturges built the 22-bed Sheer Memorial Hospital in Banepa, Nepal. He even made its bricks. His first Nepalese patient presented a challenge. Local customs prevented the examination of a woman by a male doctor. When Sturges arrived at the woman’s home at the request of her anxious husband, he was blocked by a band of midwives who denied him access to the woman. Sturges left. But the woman’s husband pled for the tall American to return. Sturges refused to go until he was assured that the midwives would be removed from the house and that he would be allowed to administer whatever treatment he deemed essential. The woman’s speedy recovery so impressed the local population that an immediate and heavy demand for his services never diminished. However, superstitions and customs of the local culture often impeded proper medical care. Sturges watched villagers die because nobody would give blood. A Tuberculosis patient avoided angering “the fever god.” Fear of a hypodermic needle thwarted immunizations from cholera. Tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases were rampant. Raylene was not only Stanley’s nurse, wife, and the mother of his three children, but she administered the hospital and “doctored” some of his patients when he had to travel to a distant Nepalese village or fly to India for important meetings. Although the view in earth’s highest mountain chain has been described as “awesome grandeur,” the 16-mile trip to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city, took two-hours. Raylene gave birth to one of their sons in a jeep during a harrowing night trip on a narrow, rutted road that clings to the treacherous, almost impassable mountain range. After Jimmy was born, rather than continue to the hospital in Kathmandu for postnatal care, the missionary nurse insisted that she and her newborn son return to Banepa so that she could return to her patients more quickly. Dr. Sturges’ sense of humor caught local observers off guard. When curious patients crowded his clinic office window as he examined another patient, they were sometimes met by well-aimed jets of water from a squirt gun he kept nearby for laughs. Local villagers loved him. When Dr. Sturges visited remote villages, the entire population would turn out to welcome him, sometimes forming a procession to escort him. On other occasions, he was bombarded with Nepalese “ticker tape,” puffed rice and leis thrown from balconies and upper-story windows. The village would consider it to be a special day. At the time of the award, John Chancellor interviewed Dr. Sturges on the Today Show, during which he stated, “Dr. Sturges, America needs more young people like you.” At the time Dr. Sturges accepted the award on national television from the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce, more than 700 Loma Linda University graduates had served in countries around the world. In recognition of this fact, Sturges, the son of missionaries to the Congo, stated with characteristic candor and simplicity that he was accepting the award not for himself alone, but for “all the others who serve without recognition.”