Healthy living requires a good dose of spirituality

The lesson learned from a disillusioned Mayo Clinic doctor during his medical school days has stuck with David Hilton for decades and influenced his life choices.

"That doctor told me that when he was in medical school he had two goals," said Hilton, assistant to the chaplain for international personnel and a physician who has practiced medicine all over the world. "One was to own a Cadillac, and the other was to be the head of a section at the Mayo Clinic. He said, `Here I am. I'm 58 years old and I've achieved my goals, and they're nothing. There must be more to life than this.' That had a great impact on me. I decided that I didn't want to spend my life seeking fame and fortune, and I've never been sorry for a minute. I don't have a lot of money saved up for retirement and I don't have a Cadillac, but I have everything I need. And I have lots of wonderful friends around the world."

Global ministry/medicine

Having spent 22 of the past 36 years living and working abroad, Hilton has had ample opportunity to make friends in dozens of cultures. His career includes a medical internship in the Panama Canal Zone for one year; practicing tropical medicine and surgery at a Methodist hospital in rural northeastern Nigeria for 10 years; operating a family practice in Wisconsin for six years; serving as a consultant in primary health care in Nigeria for four years with the Church of the Brethren; and serving as clinical director of the Seminole Tribe of Florida Health Program in the Everglades.

After six years in Florida, Hilton moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where he served for another six years as associate director of the Christian Medical Commission of the World Council of Churches. Hilton's passport was stamped to capacity during this period; he worked in more than 50 nations in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia and North America.

This rare wealth of international experience, both medical and ministerial, made Hilton a natural to replace former Assistant Chaplain Doug Cook, who retired last year. The dual responsibilities of ministry and medicine brought Hilton into contact with many young people while he was abroad. "In most Third World countries, more than 50 percent of the population is under the age of 20," he said. "The vast majority of the people in these countries are children and youth, because the birth rates are so high and their life expectancies are not nearly as high as ours." He also served as campus physician for a local college while living in Meno-monie, Wis., in the early 1970s.

Living in other cultures also helped Hilton see the problems of American society with more clarity. "I find that a lot of international students are often fascinated with American society, but at the same time rather put off by it," Hilton said. "Maybe I'm open to that because, having lived in other countries, I can see a lot of things that are wrong with our society that people who live here all time probably aren't aware of. For example, there's the severe dearth of community in our country. Students come here from Africa and Asia and they just shake their heads and wonder how we've survived. They can see how crippling it is to us to have lost that. Very few Americans can see that."

Living fully vs. avoiding death

In addition to being an ideal candidate to minister to international students, another important reason that University Chaplain Susan Henry-Crowe settled on Hilton for the chaplain's office job has to do with the anatomy lab program that the office began 15 years ago under former Chaplain Don Shockley. Each fall, Henry-Crowe meets with new medical students, who are for the first time using cadavers in their studies, and helps them deal with their feelings about death and dying, and the necessity for doctors to acclimate themselves to an environment in which death occurs regularly. Henry-Crowe felt that Hilton's experience as a physician would make him ideally suited to take on part of the anatomy lab program, which also includes a December service of Thanksgiving for those who gave their bodies for medical research, followed by a springtime service for the families of the body donors.

Quantum physics, which Hilton said views the universe not as mechanistic, but as a system of energy flows and relationships, has had a strong influence on Hilton's view of death. It also sheds a great deal of light on his ideas about life and medicine's role in it.

"Medicine is the only profession that is set up for 100 percent failure, because the goals is to keep people alive," he said. "We're spending 14 percent of our gross national product on basically prolonging death. Our goal should be to help people live. One day when I was out jogging, I saw a guy with a t-shirt that said, `Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.' He's right. When I go out jogging, it's not about adding so many years to my life. It's about being fully alive and really participating in life."

--Dan Treadaway