Summary
David Paulson was a Seventh-day Adventist medical missionary physician and social reformer who, with his wife, Dr. Mary Wild Paulson, led an array of humanitarian endeavors in Chicago and founded the Hinsdale Sanitarium in the city’s western suburbs. A man who grew up herding cattle barefoot on the Dakota frontier, Paulson rose to become one of the most prominent Adventist voices for wholistic healing, temperance, and social benevolence. He succeeded, perhaps more than any other Seventh-day Adventist, at integrating the sanitarium work outside the city and Good Samaritan work in the city into an all-encompassing redemptive mission. Though his life was cut short at age 47, the institution he founded grew into what is today UChicago Medicine AdventHealth Hinsdale, the largest hospital in DuPage County, Illinois.
Early Life on the Frontier
David’s parents, Jorgen and Carrie Paulson, emigrated from Denmark to the United States in 1863, settling on a farm near Raymond, Wisconsin. They accepted Seventh-day Adventism in 1867 through the evangelistic ministry of John G. Matteson, who spearheaded the church’s work among Scandinavians. David, born October 27, 1868, was the fourth of their six children. He had four brothers — Nels (1864—1941), Hans (b. 1865), Martin (b. 1868), and Julius (1874—1923) — along with one sister, Louisa (1877—1953).
In 1874 the Paulson family migrated westward to the Dakota Territory, settling near Vermilion, Clay County, on land made available by the Homestead Act of 1862. There, like most homesteaders on the western plains, they lived in a sod house. Decimation of successive years of crops by grasshoppers added hardships to the normal rigors of frontier life. While still a boy, David was hired out to herd cattle and recalled having to do so on bare feet because his father could not afford to buy him a pony such as the other boys had.
David was baptized at age 10 at a camp meeting held in Sioux Falls in July 1879. James and Ellen White were among the principal speakers for the event, the first of its kind to take place in Dakota Territory.
Disease and death hit the Paulson family hard in the 1880s. David’s mother, Carrie, died in February 1884. Then, an outbreak of virulent diphtheria that took the life of his brother Hans also brought David near death when he was about 15. Feeling unprepared for eternity, David promised God that “if He would heal me I would unreservedly dedicate my life to him.” The experience marked the beginning of a lasting journey of faith in partnership with God.
Education
Within a year of David’s recovery, his father, Jorgen, died in September 1885, leaving David’s older brother, Nels, in charge of the farm and responsible for his younger siblings. A sermon by William W. Prescott, president of Battle Creek College, at the 1887 Dakota camp meeting inspired David to attend the Adventist school. Support from his brother Nels helped make it possible but, as David later put it, he was “poorer than proverbial Job’s turkey” when he arrived at Battle Creek. To help meet expenses he did every kind of work he could get at Battle Creek Sanitarium: he delivered hot water to patients early in the morning, washed dishes, floors, and windows, and was a bell boy, messenger, and eventually, a night watchman.
His limited primary education in frontier Dakota left him behind his fellow students academically, but he advanced rapidly, graduating from the college’s academic course in June 1890. He then began medical school in the Fall along with a group of Adventist students who, by arrangement with the University of Michigan Medical School, took their first year of training at Battle Creek Sanitarium during the 1890—1891 school year before going to the university’s Ann Arbor campus to complete their degrees. Paulson thus had a dual purpose in transferring to Bellevue Medical College in New York City in 1892. He wanted both to gain clinical experience under renowned experts at Bellevue and “to secure greater opportunities in real medical missionary work.” In New York, he stayed at a mission operated by Dr. George D. Dowknott, who was “conducting a splendid medical missionary work in the slums.” Dowknott gave Paulson “a glimpse of the world’s need” and practical experience in meeting it.
Battle Creek Years and Spiritual Revival
After completing studies at Bellevue in 1894, Paulson joined the medical staff of Battle Creek Sanitarium as a specialist in nervous diseases. He was also a member of the faculty at the first Adventist school of medicine, the American Medical Missionary College (AMMC), opened in 1895 with training locations both in Chicago and Battle Creek.
On December 15, 1896, David married Mary Anna Wild, M.D. (1872—1956). Lycurgus McCoy conducted the ceremony held in a newly-built chapel at Battle Creek Sanitarium. Mary, or Mamie, as she was usually called, was born in Pleasantville, Westchester County, just north of New York City. Like David, she was raised in a Seventh-day Adventist home and they met as students at Battle Creek College. Mary had completed her medical degree at Northwestern University earlier in 1896. She, too, joined the medical staff of Battle Creek Sanitarium and the faculty of American Medical Missionary College, specializing in gynecology.
In his work at Battle Creek Sanitarium, David Paulson became noted not only for his medical expertise but also his impact on the spiritual life of the institution. In December 1889, while he was still a student, the preaching of Ellen G. White for a Week of Prayer at the sanitarium brought Paulson to another milestone in his Christian journey. An experience of confession and renewal led David to become a more ardent student of the Bible and the counsels of Ellen White. He returned to the sanitarium as a physician four-and-a-half years later holding a deep conviction that the sanitarium “must not be merely medical, but spiritual in its work.”
Paulson found that Bible classes for the sanitarium staff recently initiated by Percy T. Magan were well-attended despite a 4:00 A.M. start time. Paulson then expanded what Magan had begun, “organizing classes for the study of all phases of religious life in every department of the institution.” These efforts led to a “mighty religious awakening and revival in the Battle Creek Sanitarium,” according to Magan, and to renewed zeal for medical missionary service.
Mission to Chicago
In 1893, Dr. Kellogg organized the Medical Missionary and Benevolent Association to advance Adventist medical and humanitarian ministry in cities. In Chicago, particularly, Kellogg focused on bringing relief and uplift to the neediest classes of humanity. The Chicago Medical Mission opened in June 1893 in the “skid row district.” Its services — a medical dispensary, bath and laundry facilities, and a visiting nurse service — were all provided free of charge, and a penny lunch counter soon followed. When a sharp economic downturn added thousands to the ranks of the unemployed and homeless, a Workingmen’s Home was opened providing lodging for 10 cents per night and food for a penny a dish. Gospel services were conducted nightly at the nearby Life Boat Mission.
A turning point came in 1899 when William S. Sadler proposed bolstering the work by recruiting freshman nursing students to come to the city to serve the poor on a self-supporting basis. Paulson, who was functioning as acting superintendent of the sanitarium while Dr. Kellogg was on an extended trip to Europe, quickly warmed to Sadler’s idea. He ran into strong resistance from some members of the institution’s board, who worried that “some of the young people would probably go to the devil in Chicago.” But Paulson insisted that “it would do them good to get them into direct contact with the needs of humanity.” The board finally agreed and proposed that the Drs. Paulson go to Chicago with the cadre of young people and oversee their activities.
With the board’s approval secured, David and Mary along with 40 first-year students set out for Chicago. Their lodging was provided at the headquarters of the Chicago Medical Mission, then at 1926 Wabash Avenue, but it was up to them to find ways to cover all other expenses. Each day began with an hour of sharing experiences followed by instruction on methods from the Paulsons. For Paulson, the joyful service, consecrated energy, and prayerful innovation of the 40 students in the 1899—1900 class defined the ethos of love for suffering humanity that he sought to impress upon the young Adventist professionals whom he trained.
The Life Boat Magazine
After sharing editorial responsibility for the Life Boat magazine with W. S. Sadler, David Paulson became sole editor in 1903. The magazine was integral to the Chicago Medical Mission as a means for publicizing the multiple facets of its work, raising funds, and providing information on the urban social problems it addressed, such as unemployment, poverty, the plight of prisoners and ex-convicts, indigent youth, prostitution, and addiction to alcohol and other harmful substances. Circulation was estimated at 150,000 in 1903.
Hinsdale Sanitarium
The Paulsons’ initial connection with Hinsdale, an upscale suburb 17 miles west of Chicago, came about through another facet of the Chicago mission. The Life Boat Rest, opened in February 1900, provided lodging and aid to young women desiring escape from prostitution. The Life Boat Rescue Service sent out mature female workers during the night to seek out “their lost and fallen sisters who are so entangled in the intricate meshes of sin and vice to be unapproachable in any other way.”
Because the small number of beds at the Life Boat Rescue could not accommodate the demand, Mary Paulson led out in the search for a better facility, preferably outside the city. As David put it, “The Lord had wonderfully blessed” the rescue work “but we found that we were leaving the fish too near the shore.” The Paulsons thus gladly accepted an offer from C. E. Kimbell, a wealthy businessman who had benefited from treatment at the Chicago Branch Sanitarium, of a two-story house in Hinsdale, rent free for six months, with a minimal charge thereafter.
Once again, C. E. Kimbell facilitated new opportunity, this time by purchasing an idyllic 10-acre property in Hinsdale for $16,000 and turning over the deed to be paid for in 20 annual installments without interest. The Paulsons moved to the Hinsdale property in March 1904.
Two months later, Ellen White, during a long layover while traveling by train through Chicago, spent five hours with the Paulsons in Hinsdale. “It is just the place for a sanitarium,” she wrote. “The atmosphere is good and the surroundings are beautiful.”
The Hinsdale Sanitarium and Benevolent Association was formed in October 1904 as a charitable, non-profit organization. The property had been the summer estate of Judge Corydon Beckwith (1823—1890), a respected Chicago jurist who had served a brief term as chief justice of the Illinois State Supreme Court. The Paulsons lived in the servants’ cottage. The main house was renovated for treatment and accommodation of patients and a new wing built onto it that provided an additional 17 rooms. Dedication ceremonies on September 20, 1905, marked the official opening of Hinsdale Sanitarium. It was filled to capacity with patients within three weeks.
The Rescue Home and Good Samaritan Inn
When the sanitarium board was organized, Paulson was determined not to neglect the “sick poor” — the disadvantaged classes to whom he was dedicated with a sacred passion. He vowed to the members:
“Unless you are going to help me do something for the poor here there is no use for me to go on, for I am going to do something for them. Let my right hand forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth when I cease to be a missionary to the earth’s sorrowing and distressed multitudes. We are going to act in Hinsdale what we preached in Chicago.”
In 1909, Paulson also led out in establishment of another institution in Hinsdale to serve the poor — the Good Samaritan Inn. While hospitals and dispensaries that served the poor could be found, the Inn sought to make the distinctive sanitarium experience — healthful diet, simple treatments, rest and rejuvenation in pleasant outdoor setting — available to those unable to afford the usual costs.
For the Betterment of Humanity
Paulson was a lively lecturer who made his exhortations to radical health reforms entertaining. A newspaper reporter wrote that his address in 1915 at an Adventist annual state meeting at Columbia, Missouri, was “illumined by as keen and as intellectual humor as Columbia has ever heard and Columbia has heard some of the world’s great men.” To dramatize the importance of fresh air, Paulson advised an audience of Chicago schoolchildren in 1911 “to break the glass in their bedroom windows if they found them nailed down.” He added: “Don’t worry about the cost. Send the bill to me.”
Paulson became president of the Anti-Cigarette League in 1906. “No sane man offers an apology for cigarette smoking except the man who makes them,” Paulson declared to a gathering of the Cook County (Illinois) Teachers’ Association in 1909. The ACL’s campaign won wide support during the first two decades of the 20th century, with 15 states enacting laws against the manufacture, sale, and use of cigarettes.
Paulson was also an outspoken advocate of prohibition and women’s suffrage. The latter was imperative, he argued, to empower a distinctly feminine influence in the public arena. “It is time for the settlement workers, the W.C.T.U., the Federated Women’s Clubs, and other women’s organizations to band together and rise to the necessity of the ballot for women so that they may have a hand in cleaning the city,” he urged in 1910.
The anti-lynching crusader and progressive reformer Ida B. Wells-Barnett invited Paulson to speak at least twice at the Negro Fellowship League that she founded in Chicago as a social service center for young Black men and a base for Christian activism for racial justice.
Turbulence Over the Testimonies
Paulson’s manifold achievements came amidst a deep crisis that brought the Seventh-day Adventist church close to schism. In Battle Creek during the 1890s, Paulson became an avid devotee of Ellen White’s writings. At the same time, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg became his mentor and teacher as a physician. Paulson found inspiration and purpose in the medical missionary ideal — the uplift of humanity through benevolence and healthful living — that Kellogg championed. By 1900, though, a chasm between the two was becoming increasingly apparent.
When Dr. Kellogg’s plan to publish his book The Living Temple stirred a firestorm of controversy in the church, Paulson believed that Kellogg’s exposition aligned with what Ellen White herself had written. But a showdown was averted in October 1903 by the timely arrival of testimonies from Ellen White that starkly denounced The Living Temple. One of the letters, addressed to Paulson, emphatically denied his claim “that the sentiments expressed in Living Temple in regard to God can be sustained by my writings.” Paulson was “accepting as truth the specious sophistry of the enemy,” she wrote. Reportedly stunned by the forcefulness of the testimony, Paulson readily yielded.
Later, Paulson took the opportunity to ask Ellen White what she thought about solutions he had worked out to the dissonance he experienced over her writings. He explained that during his intensive study of her writings in the 1890s, he had concluded, based on her assertions about the divine source of her testimonies, “that every word that you spoke in public or private, that every letter you wrote under any and all circumstances, was as inspired as the ten commandments.” The experience of discovering inconsistencies forced him to conclude “that he had been contending for a position that you yourself never warranted.”
Ellen White’s response affirmed that Paulson’s pre-1900 belief in the verbal inspiration of her writings was indeed a misconception widely held among Adventists. She had never “made any such claims” nor had “the pioneers of our cause.” Published in the Review and Herald, Ellen White’s reply was a significant public clarification of how she understood the spiritual authority of her writings.
By 1909, Ellen White could say without qualification that “Brother Paulson is doing a great work” and so were “those that are united with him.”
Prayer and Action
David Paulson’s autobiographical reflections, collected and published posthumously in Footprints of Faith (1921), are a series of testimonies to answered prayer. “The trouble with some folks is, their prayers are so general that if they were answered they would never know it, and if they were not answered they would never miss it,” he said. He did not mean by this that prayer is a magical tool for manipulating God. The Lord may have a purpose in delaying the answer or sometimes “gives us something else that is better for us” but, he insisted, “God hears every sincere prayer offered in the name of Christ.”
An eminent Chicago surgeon, Dr. Franklin H. Martin, in telling the story to Dr. Percy T. Magan, said that he would have dismissed as a fanatic anyone else who talked about prayer the way David Paulson did, but somehow sensed that with Paulson he was “in the presence of one to whom God was a real, living, personal Friend and confidant.” Martin added that “many a soul who came to the Hinsdale Sanitarium would be under the sod today were it not for David Paulson’s prayers.”
Final Year
David Paulson’s life of remarkable accomplishments for the health of others was also an ongoing “battle against a naturally frail constitution.” In February 1916 he became ill with “a raging fever and profound toxemia” and never made a full recovery. Respite at Madison Sanitarium in Tennessee, then at Boulder Sanitarium in Colorado, and finally at Asheville, North Carolina, brought only partial and temporary improvements. His death in Asheville on October 15, 1916, less than two weeks before his 48th birthday, was attributed to acute pulmonary tuberculosis. After a service in the gymnasium at Hinsdale Sanitarium, he was laid to rest in Bronswood Cemetery, Oak Park, Illinois.
In 1921, Dr. Mary Paulson married Adventist physician John H. Neall, who joined her on the medical staff at Hinsdale. She died in Azusa, California, on March 11, 1956, at age 83, and was interred next to David Paulson at Bronswood Cemetery.
Legacy
The College of Medical Evangelists (later Loma Linda University School of Medicine) dedicated a memorial to David Paulson on its Los Angeles campus on March 13, 1932. David Paulson Memorial Hall, a 1,000-seat assembly hall, came about at the initiative of David Paulson’s close friend, Percy T. Magan, president of the college, supported by A. G. Daniells, president of the board. “My beloved husband looked as though he were giving one of his loving and earnest talks to the audience,” wrote Mary Paulson Neall regarding a large portrait of David hung beside the front stage.
Hinsdale Hospital, Paulson’s most enduring institutional legacy, became the largest hospital in DuPage County, Illinois. It was renamed UChicago Medicine AdventHealth Hinsdale after a joint ownership agreement between University of Chicago Medicine and AdventHealth was reached in September 2022.
Dr. Franklin H. Martin captured the personality and character that sparked these achievements: “His inspired and inspiring life, his clear vision, his irresistible enthusiasm for the promulgation of the truth, his wise counsel, his ability to impart knowledge, his love for the outcast, the downhearted and neglected of the earth, all combine to make David Paulson one of God’s noblemen.”
