Dr. Dowkontt’s Solution

For a number of years the medical colleges in the city of New York granted to the students recommended by the International Medical Missionary Society a very liberal reduction in tuition fees, but at length these concessions were entirely withdrawn. This action brought great embarrassment to Dr. Dowkontt and his co-workers. They were faced, on the one hand, by “a crowd of noble young men and women ... clamoring for admission and aid that they may respond to the cries for help in these dark lands; while on the other, the colleges demand such high fees that it is not in the power of the society and these applicants to meet [them].”—Ibid., 73.SHM 264.3

Dr. Dowkontt felt that the only solution to this problem was the securing of a charter for a medical missionary college that might be operated by the society. On inquiry at the state offices in Albany, New York, he learned that it would be necessary to raise $50,000 for this purpose, and even this would vest them with authority only to give the necessary instruction, the examinations and degrees to be granted the finishing students by accredited medical schools.SHM 264.4

A silver dollar which had been given to one of his dying children, and which had been cherished for some years as a treasured memento, became the first dollar of a fund looking toward the raising of the amount necessary for the charter. By 1898 Dr. Dowkontt reported that the fund had by that time reached $5,000, and pleadingly said: “When this is multiplied by ten, ... we can obtain our charter from the local authorities and found our college, and for this we pray and labor and plan and wait.”—Tell Them, 249. New York: Office of the Medical Missionary Record, 1898.SHM 265.1

At this point the train of influences reaching from Dr. Peter Parker to Dr. Abercrombie and the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society and on to Dr. Dowkontt and the International Medical Missionary Society in New York City reached and profoundly influenced the early work of the Seventh-day Adventists. In order to make this point of contact clear we must go back a few years to the summer of 1891.SHM 265.2