John Pollock's biography of Dr. Nelson Bell is well researched and written in straightforward, easily understood prose. Dr. Bell led an unusually active life, being a missionary physician in China in the 1920s and 1930s when war, thieving, highway robbery, murder, and corruption were pervasive. Despite this, Dr. Bell and his wife managed to rear a family, expand the services of the hospital where they worked, make many friends, and give health care to many in need. As a surgeon, Dr. Bell operated on a variety of ailments, but it was the spiritual ills of the people that ultimately concerned him the most. War and ill health forced Dr. Bell to finish his medical career in North Carolina, where his daughter Ruth resided with husband Billy Graham (the evangelist) and where he, along with Graham, founded the magazine Christianity Today. He lived a long and highly productive life, and Pollock's rendering of it is done with engaging diplomacy.

I would assess this book on a couple of different levels. First of all, it is a very interesting story. A young physician with a promising future decides to spend his life as a medical missionary in China giving much needed medical care to the poor and destitute. Dr. Bell and his wife began their service in China in 1916, and remained there until 1941, at the beginning of World War II. As a missionary story, it embraces all the familiar themes: sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself, spending one's own time and resources to help those who are less fortunate, adapting to a new culture, improving the lives of people through basic health care, raising children in a foreign culture and so on.

At another level, though, this book is a very important contribution to missionary literature, because it deals with so many of the issues that are fundamental to the development of effective missionary efforts. Nelson Bell was a physician, but he never minimized the importance of addressing the spiritual needs of the people as well as their physical needs. So many have yielded to the temptation to come down hard on one side of the other. But if we would follow the example of Christ himself, we will always insist on meeting both kinds of needs.

Dr. Bell had dedicated his life to help the Chinese people, but he never pretended to be Chinese. Of course one must accept a certain amount of sacrifice to live for a prolonged period of time in a developing culture. But Dr. Bell never fell into the all too familiar trap of "sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice" which is sometimes found among sincere folks who have given themselves for the "great cause" and sometimes suffered deprivations that were not really necessary. One interesting anecdote illustrates this. A new missionary doctor had come to China to intern under Dr. Bell. This young couple stood on the deck of the ship as it pulled into the harbor in Shanghai. They felt somewhat overcome by the change they were going to have to adapt too. As they left the ship, and braced themselves for the rigor of this transition, they were met on the dock by Dr. Bell with a greeting that caught them by surprise, "How would you like a chocolate sundae?"

Finally, this book shines as an example of how to deal with a difficult government. As the Japanese moved into China in the thirties, foreign consulates urged their citizens to leave the country, since their safety could no longer be guaranteed. But Dr. Bell refused to go. As soon as the Japanese occupied the city where he was working, he presented himself to the commanding officer, and reported on what he was doing, and that he intended to stay. His calm, levelheaded approach established his neutrality, and won him the unqualified respect of the Japanese officers. At one point, he had gotten a letter from his daughter, who had been evacuated from her boarding school in Korea. All the children were in Shanghai, waiting to be sent to America, but she sent an urgent letter to her parents begging to be allowed to stay in China and study at home. The Japanese officer who delivered the letter to Dr. Bell had obviously read it. "Tell her to come," he said, "She will be safe here.

I heartily recommend this book for all those who are interested in mercy missions, but also for anyone who just enjoys a good story about a man and his family who lived to make life better for the people around them. Would this book have been written if Dr. Bell's daughter had not married Billy Graham? Perhaps not, but that does not diminish its value. This book clearly stands alone as a premium example of how to do medical missions effectively. Read it for the wealth of information it provides, or just read it as a happy, homey, heartwarming story.