Sacred Art of Nursing

Introduction

Bushnell University in Eugene, Oregon was first founded as a divinity school (1895). It was then called: Eugene Divinity School and it was strategically adjacent to the University of Oregon. The founder, first president of the Eugene Divinity School was Eugene Sanderson.  According to Myers (1948), Sanderson- “became convinced that the best plan for the church was to co-operate with the state university rather than try to compete with it.”

The purpose of this research is to see the coordination of benevolence and healing in this specific community from various Christian organizations and histories. From this purpose, various questions surfaced that helped clarify the main research question, which is:

Why did the Christian college in Eugene Oregon, build a hospital in the 1920s?  What was the context, its motivation, and goals? What was the result?  Why and how was the hospital sold to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace?

We learned that the Pacific Christian Hospital was linked to another organization called the International Bible Mission. Eugene Sanderson was also the president of this newly developed “umbrella” organization.

A Christian Calling “for Volunteers”

This story is certainly about Eugene Sanderson, but it is also about others like Walter Myers, who served this intuition faithfully during the time of Sanderson, but also after Sanderson’s quick resignation in the later part of the 1920s.

The concept of vocation and calling at Bushnell University is theological, biblical, and rooted in a deep history of this institution.  For example, we discovered that in 1919, Rev. Walter Myers of the then Eugene Bible University published in the Christian Journal- an important call for what he called: “Christian volunteers”.

This specific article provides excellent illustration to both calling and vocation from a Christian perspective. For Myers it was a Christian call, with various applications….it was a call for Christian volunteers to address “poverty, disease, and suffering,” and “the dying.” It was the call to issues related to- “degraded womanhood,” particularly, “the widows of war,” “ill treatment,” and “abuses”. For Myers, the calling was also to education: to teach reading and literacy, and a call to address “ignorance”, and a call to address those who have been “oppressed”.

Rev. Walter Myers concludes: “What and who shall answer the call?”. A Christian theology of ministry, well at least from this perspective, includes ministry of the church, certainly, but also ministry to the poor, to the widows, to the orphans, and to those suffering from disease and death. It is also a calling of healing others.

This was in 1919 and it is an important context of calling and ministries of what transpires next. Goodrich states that in July of 1922 the Board of Trustees for EBU, “launched plans to establish a Hospital” and “inaugurate a half-million dollar campaign…” (p. 141).  It was “argued that the hospital would add to the welfare of the students and open channels of Christian services….[and] Community cooperation” (Goodrich, p. 141).  Construction of the “Pacific Christian Hospital began in 1923 [and was then] “well equipped,” “ably staffed” and “dedicated in 1924” (Goodrich, p. 141). EBU would then operate a Nurses Training program at the hospital.

The Christian Journal of the institution concludes that the hospital’s mission is simple: the mission is “being Christ-like” (p. 2).  By 1922, the public announcement of this new: Pacific Christian Hospital described it as an: “act of Christian Benevolence,” and that the hospital is now: “a visible expression of the spirit of Jesus among the churches of Christ” to “aid those in physical need (1924, p. 15). It was based upon a dedication to serve individuals suffering and to provide a “hand of mercy” in the “sacred art of Christian nursing” (1924, p. 15). The article concludes that the “physical material of construction is concrete. The spirit of the institution is from above, and doctrinally it is founded upon the Rock” (p. 15).