New Zealand's Greatest Doctor:
Ulric Williams of Wanganui
A Surgeon who became a Naturopath
By Brenda Sampson
An interview with Collet Saunders
Collet Saunders was a pastor in a non-conformist church, who lived in New Plymouth. He had severe back pain; the chiropractors had not been able to fix it. He could not bend down to tie his shoes or wash his face. He was returning from a trip south and decided to get off the bus at Wanganui to consult Ulric Williams. He had limited time before the next bus. He told his story and asked for help.
"Why should you ask me for help?"
"I thought that was your job, helping people like me."
"What did you say your occupation is?"
"I am a minister."
"And you come to me for help? Who do you think heals? Where does healing come from?"
"Well, all healing has to come from the Lord; basically; though he does use doctors and so on."
"Yes, but where IS the Lord?"
"Well, the Bible says our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit."
"You're getting on fine. So the healing you want, must be right inside the body you want healing for?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
He said, "What the devil do you want me to do for you? Look, boy, I was far worse than you with my back. I couldn't get round the block. My back was getting worse and worse. I couldn't dig the garden. I couldn't dress myself to go and see my patients. I couldn't walk around the block without sitting in the gutter or hanging on to the fence several times. I thought, "This is terrible, this is the end of everything." I could see myself in a wheelchair and wondered who was going to wheel it.
Then my wife came to me one day and said, "Do you know what the trouble is?"
"Of course, I don't. If I did, I would fix it."
She said, "It's all in your mind!"
I wouldn't like to tell you what I called her for saying that to me. But she came back later and said, "You know you have got it in your mind that you have a bad back, and you're going to be in a wheelchair, and that is colouring everything. In spite of all you know, and all you teach other people, you've got it in your mind that you are going to be in a wheelchair." She rubbed that in, and I told her what I thought of her. I churned it over and over. I said, "You cannot catch me out on that." But I was caught.
Collet said to the doctor, " So what did you do? I'm very interested to hear."
"Well, I threw it out; the thought of my bad back, and so on, the wheelchair and every other blooming thing."
"What happened?"
"Well, my back was all right then, from then on!"
Collet was still thinking of his own back, and looking at the time. He said, "My bus goes in quarter of an hour. Have you got anything for me? A diet or anything?'
"You don't need a diet. Come here, stand up for a minute." I stood up, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Lord, help this young fellow to get his eyes open and see that he is all right." Then, "Good day! Off you go!"
I grabbed my bag and began to tear down the road, watching for the bus. When I got to the stop, I realised I had been running, and the pain was gone! His testimony, and realising he had come the same way, shifted my mind about. His wife had given him shock treatment, and he gave me shock treatment. It's the shock treatment that moves your mind from one mental picture to a new one, and puts you into a new gear.
I just went on from there, and later on he wrote to me and we corresponded. I used to call in every time I went down to Wellington. Later I brought him back to New Plymouth with me and we had a mass meeting with quite a lot of correspondence. When I moved out of the church, he wrote, "Congratulations on being turned out of the synagogue. Now we have a fellow feeling. Now you will begin to learn!" Then he began to write little bits for me to publish in the Truth Seeker. For about 25 years he has written two or three different series.
We've kept in touch, and he shared some of his experiences, to help me understand how people are dealt with. One case made an impression on me. I don't know any names, but it was a woman diagnosed with double breast cancers. She was due for surgery within a week, and before she went into hospital, a friend brought her to Ulric to see what he could do.
He said, "I asked her to let me have a look, and there they were, two beauties. Having been a surgeon, I knew one or two years would be her limit, though they are doing better now. My challenge was how to get at the cause of it. I said, "What are you hiding? I don't want any lies."
"I am not hiding anything. I am a Christian. I go to church every Sunday."
"You must be hiding something. You don't get those for nothing. Go back to the beginning. Go back a few years. Tell me something in your life that should not be there."
Oh well, about fifteen years ago I had a love affair. I really wanted this man and I thought he wanted me. I told him there was a baby on the way. He said,
"I will marry you, but I am not going to live with you. I will give the baby a name, and then I am going to disappear. That was the best I could get out of him. We went through the marriage ceremony, legally married, and he disappeared, leaving me to have the baby on my own. I've never seen him since. She is fifteen now. She is a nice girl. We have a quiet life, living together."
Ulric said, "And all this time, spiritually speaking, you've been beating your breasts in remorse. What have you been saying to yourself?"
"I have been saying what any woman would have said, "I've spoilt my life, spoilt his life, spoilt my child's life."
He said, "Right, it's been bang, bang, bang, on your breasts, spiritually and mentally speaking. Yet you say you have been living a quiet life."
"I never go out anywhere except to church on Sunday."
"When you do go to church, you are a hypocrite."
"Oh no, I try to be sincere."
"Look," he said, "I suppose you believe in the forgiveness of sins? And you keep repeating 'washed in the blood of the lamb'? But you have not believed it; otherwise you wouldn't have had this reaction. What you have to do, is to believe it when you go to church. Do you believe that the Lord has forgiven you?"
"Oh yes, of course, of course!"
"Well, forgive yourself, and stop beating your breasts and saying I have spoilt my life, etc. Accept forgiveness from now on. Throw the whole thing out. There is no sin left; it is washed away. Say to yourself, "It is OK. Everything is good now." Go back to your own home. Postpone this trip to the doctor and the hospital. Go through these words in your mind, 'I am cleansed in the blood of the lamb. I do receive pardon in the name of the Lord. I am accepting forgiveness. I am condemned no more.' Keep it up! Cleanse your mind and come back to see me in a fortnight."
You know that was a challenge! She came back in a fortnight, and one was almost completely gone; the other took a bit longer. She escaped both operations and both came away perfectly clean. Just by cleansing her mind and accepting forgiveness deep down in her mind."
There were other cases along the same lines. Ulric realised that his main job after he changed from surgery was to get to the cause of the troubles. He had been working for 14 years as a surgeon at the Wanganui Hospital, day after day, tearing out appendices and other things, and feeling it was not the right thing to do, to be mutilating the bodies God had given these people. But he did not know anything else. It was the way he was taught.
He began to be convicted about this constant surgery; constant handing out of medicine. He felt there was no real help in it. He gave up his practice. He said, "Several times the Lord met me at the door and said, 'How long are you going to go on doing this, Williams?', and I began to get convicted more and more."
You know, he was a wild man in his way. A fine youth in his earliest days. A very rugged man, very forthright. It took drastic dealings to bring him to repentance. He was a great drinker and boozer. Liked the girls. He told me how he pulled up on that. "The Lord put his fist in my face, and said, 'Once more, Williams, and you are cut off!' and I stopped in my tracks."
He was drastic man, and a good servant of the devil. When he became converted, he was just as much the other way. He was that type of man. He would not have got his message over if he had not been. He had to have a deep experience on the negative side before he could be strong on the positive side. He was still very rugged when he dealt with some of his patients. He called it explosive healing.
One day I was in his waiting room. The man beside me went through before me, and in five minutes, I heard unprintable language coming through the door. Soon the man bounced out of the other door. He crossed the passage and went out like a thunderstorm. I went in next and commented on what I had heard. "You can't talk to patients like that!"
"Oh well, the silly fool that he is. He has already let those blighters have his appendix. Now he is getting ready to let them have his gall bladder. He won't listen to common sense. Ulric stormed on for a bit till he calmed down. I had my time with him and a talk. I was walking down the street, (having missed my bus as usual) when I saw the man on a street corner, rolling a cigarette. I said, "We met a little while ago, in Dr Williams' surgery. You did not sound very happy in there?"
He said, "What a monster! I came all the way from Dunedin for this interview. It cost me all my savings for a long time. The only man I wanted to see was Ulric Williams." Collet said, "I wouldn't throw it all out of your mind; it might have been needed. There may have been a bit of shock treatment in it. You had better think over what he said."
That was his method, you see, when he felt that people were unreceptive, would not listen, were going the old way of the doctors. I suppose he offered the man diet treatment, or new thought treatment, and saw he was not getting the message home, and just opened up on all valves at once and told him what a fool he was. I hoped that on the way home, the man might think again about what the doctor had said, seeing that it cost him so much.
Over the years, I have seen many people in distress, and souls in shock, and I can see now from my experience that there is no real healing until we change from within, until we get a new outlook. Sometimes we want to use a good man here, or a good man there, or something else. We want healing without changing. But we don't get far that way. Even Jesus could not heal certain people if they were not willing to change from within. But those who were receptive could receive instant healing. It depends on the state of spiritual growth and receptivity. Unless people have got to a stage of receiving new thoughts and being willing to work on the lines of the New Testament, neither Ulric Williams nor Christ himself, could change them or help them. But when the change has taken place, or the person is ready for it, people like Ulric Williams are very valuable indeed. His cases of positive healing were wonderful. Those people with a receptive state of mind, who were ready to obey and make the necessary changes, always got healing, I believe. But others just wanted him to act like ordinary doctors. "Let them heal me and I will pay my money and carry on life as usual." That is the way ordinary people use the medical service, as a means to save them from pain and distress. But to change their lives, or their thinking, or their daily habits, would be another matter altogether. If the doctor says, "Now let us look into the psychology of this, and see how you are living, and how you are thinking; let us make some drastic changes", half the patients would not go back to him. They would look for an easier way, another man who would give some pills to take the pain away.
Think about smoking. Lots of people I talk to on my daily round are coughing and spluttering. I say, "Look at you smoking, that is not right, knock it off." They say, "No, I am not prepared to do that." When they get an attack they will ring their doctor and expect him to supply them with pills, to save them at the critical moment without asking them to change their habits.
Ulric Williams was more than a doctor. He was a reformer trying to teach people right living. He told me that the real duty of the medical profession should be to teach people how to be healthy. Doctor means teacher, and he kept repeating in magazine articles, that doctors should be there to teach people how to live healthily; not to sit back and trade on their sicknesses after they have got them.
There was one magazine article that I thought terrible. He said doctors are disease-mongers, and churches sin factories. Patients are put through the doctor's hands in the hundreds, the doctor collecting from them all the time. They are no better than the ministers who are always harping on about sin, and saying you must come to our church, and receive our ceremony, or our salvation, and you pay as you come in. They are trading on sin, not on righteousness.
If people were living righteously and happily, in tune with the Infinite, there would be no need to support thousands of ministers and priests and all their paraphernalia. But these have stepped in between the people and the Lord. They imply that if you want to touch the Lord and become righteous, you must come to us, we use instruments. I can see that now. I see it more strongly than ever.
B.S. interrupted saying, "I sometimes listen to Faith for Today (a programme on the National Programme in the 70's). I think young ministers are more in touch with God than the old ministers, that I used to hear when I was young."
Collet replied, "Changes must come in every direction. Changes are coming. People are broadening out. Eventually they will see that there is no need for established churches. People only have to tune in and live righteously.
In a town the size of New Plymouth there are dozens of denominations, each with a few paid representatives. All vying for the same people to enter their church to keep it alive and give them a living."
B.S. "Don't you think they only want to introduce people to Jesus. It does not matter about it being in their church?"
Collet, "If that was so they would go out among the people more. I have been 25 years in the church and out of it for 25 years. At present, I have a job that keeps me in touch with hundreds of people all the time. It is far easier for me now to speak the truth to people, in the measure that they need it, than when I was a minister. Then I was shut up in my group. I had to show loyalty to those above me, and show a kind of balance sheet of people and finances every half year. How many new members have you made? How are your finances going up? I always felt those at the top were watching how I got on. I was not free to move in and out among the people. I could not say what I wanted to say. There were a set of tenets to uphold and be faithful to. After I had been in it for a while I found that I was being hindered by the very thing I had thought was going to help me. I went into it in all sincerity. I went wild for a while, but then I came back and got into the work again."
