Dr. Arthur Geschke, his wife, and their infant son left San Francisco on a Japanese liner headed for Thailand. They accepted a call to serve as a medical missionary in southeast Asia and were just starting their new adventure.
In late 1939, Dr. Arthur Geschke accepted a call to serve as a medical missionary in southeast Asia. He, his wife, and their infant son left San Francisco on a Japanese liner headed for Thailand. Dr. Geschke’s assignment would be to develop a clinic in Phuket [poo-ket], an island off the country’s southwest coast with a population of some 50,000 people. After learning about the church’s work in various locations, Phuket’s business and civic leaders offered to support the establishment of the clinic.
On the clinic’s opening day, Dr. Geschke performed surgery on a seriously ill patient. The man had been turned away from a government hospital and was told that nothing could be done for him. Geschke won the full confidence of the community when the patient recovered. Within a month, the clinic was treating 60 outpatients per day and the 15 beds it had set up for outpatients were continuously occupied. “It seemed that practically every one of importance in the city knew of Dr. Geschke and counted him as a friend,” a mission administrator reported a few years later. He added, “They told us of several people he had saved from death and about the great good he had done.”
The United States’ entry into World War II in December 1941 brought the thriving work of the Phuket Mission Clinic to a halt after just one year of operation. Dr. Geschke contacted the British consul in Phuket, and received instructions to arrive with his family at the beach in 10 minutes. There, they were picked up by a British vessel en route to Singapore. The ship was buzzed by Japanese dive bombers, but they did not attack, probably because the captain had ordered the British flag to be removed and replaced with the flag of Thailand, an ally of Japan.
The Geschke family and other missionaries boarded the last American freighter out of Singapore before that city was captured. The ship sailed to Cape Town, South Africa, since a Pacific crossing was deemed too dangerous. Part of the crew deserted in Cape Town but the ship proceeded to cross the Atlantic, sailing in a zig-zag pattern to escape enemy torpedoes. It arrived safely in New York two months later.
Phuket Mission Clinic, later known as Phuket Adventist Hospital, reopened in July 1949. New structures have been built over the decades and the hospital’s services expanded. Renamed Mission Hospital Phuket in 2002, it’s an 83-bed hospital operated by the Southeast Asia Union Mission.
After retiring from full-time medical practice Dr. Geschke moved to a mountain home near Yosemite National Park in California, United States and continued to practice medicine on a limited basis into his 80s. He died just shy of his 93rd birthday.
Dr. Geschke spent his life in service to others, and his legacy lives on to this day. For more stories about pioneer missionaries, visit encyclopedia.adventist.org.
