Religion: Saint in Santiago

In Santiago, Chile, a deaf woman in the jampacked audience at the Teatro Central had trouble following the ceremony on the stage. She turned to her husband, asked why the American nurse was getting a medal: “Because she had 8,000 babies,” he answered. “Impossible!” gasped his wife.

But that was what the speakers had said and in a sense it was true. Because of Missionary-Nurse Marie Schultze, a 49-year-old Presbyterian, 98% of the 8,000 babies survived the critical first five years of childhood. At her tiny, spotless Madre e Hijo Clinic in Santiago’s squalid slums, she had given 20 years to prove that Chile’s average infant mortality rate could be cut from 21.7% to less than 2%. For this, she became last fortnight the second woman* to receive the Chilean Government’s highest decoration to foreigners: the Orden al Merito.

Born in Baltimore, Marie Schultze won her R.N. in three years’ hard work at Presbyterian Hospital in Newark, was sent to Chile in 1927 by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. In Santiago, she turned an old artist’s studio in the slums into a six-bed clinic. To persuade the poor, superstitious women that they should have their children at the clinic, tall, good-natured Nurse Schultze gave free care for the first six months of her new enterprise in charity.

Today her clinic has 19 beds; mothers stay ten days, pay 500 pesos (about $15.80) for prenatal care, hospitalization and care of the child until it is six years old. Top Chilean doctors and obstetricians give their services free. Marie Schultze herself gets less than $1,200 a year, lives in a small apartment behind the clinic. Her reward: “The satisfaction I feel when I know I have had a vital part in saving some life.”

Despite its Presbyterian tie, Marie Schultze has taken her clinic far above sect. Mothers in the 100% Catholic neighborhood never balk at going to the Protestant clinic. All but one of her doctors are Catholic, and when good Nurse Schultze got her medal, a Catholic priest made the introductory speech.

Today Marie Schultze dreams of the time when she can build a big maternity hospital and nurses’ training school. The plans are drawn. She is trying to raise the money, peso by peso. Of her dream she says: “I pray again as these new ideas unfold before me that I may be used wherever and however He would have me, and that I may have an open mind and heart to hear His voice.”

* The first: Director Elizabeth Mason of Santiago’s Colegio Americano para Senoritas, also a U.S. Protestant missionary (Methodist).