The Old Shanghai Sanitarium

Shanghai had a number of sanitoria. The Shanghai Sanitarium (which used the less common spelling or an ‘a’ rather than an ‘o’) was on Range Road, up in the old Northern External Roads past Hongkew Park (what is now Lu Xun Park and the Hongkou Stadium). As this advert comes from 1946 after some road name changes following the abolition of the foreign concessions it is also described as Wutsin Road (and now Wujin Lu). The Sanitarium was linked to the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Shanghai, also based on Range Road (I’ve blogged about their building before here).

The Sanitarium was established by Dr Harry Willis Miller, a Seventh Day Adventist, in 1925. Miller ( alifelong vegetarian and one of the original developers of soy milk apparently) was a long term China veteran having arrived in 1903 as a young man. He was a surgeon and apparently performed over 6,000 thyroid operations in China (a particularly bad condition at the time due to the lack of iodine in the salt). He was still active in 1960 when the he was asked by the Seventh Dayay Adventist Church to establish a hospital in Hong Kong