Anna Hoppe (1889–1941), the Milwaukee stenographer who wrote more than six hundred hymns and translations, is represented in our hymnal by this one text alone, though her contemporaries ranked her among the finest Lutheran hymn writers in the land. It first appeared in The Northwestern Lutheran in 1928 under the heading “Jesus Our Physician,” opening then with the line “O Thou, Who once in Galilee.” The hymn gathers the Gospel scenes in which Jesus served the afflicted in body, giving hearing to the deaf, speech to the mute, and sight to the blind, a fitting companion to the day’s account of the deaf man healed. Decades of revision have left a few rough seams: in the second stanza “ones” and “known” no longer rhyme as Hoppe’s “own” and “known” once did, and the leap from the third stanza to the fourth, from bodily healing to spiritual, comes so abruptly that a singer in real bodily distress might feel forgotten. The hymn’s confidence, that the same Lord who healed in Galilee still heals His people, holds it together.
Sung at Our Saviour
2025