Chinese have graduated from the University of Pennsylvania dental
school, and they have set up in business throughout the Chinese treaty
ports. Others have graduated from Hongkong’s school, and still others,
entering as apprentices under Chinese dentists, trained abroad, soon
start out for themselves and pass the good work along. When customers
are slow in coming, the Chinese dentist adds another shingle to his
door. “Dentist and Photographer”; “Dentist and Printer”; “Dentist
and Manufacturers’ Agent,” are common signs. A good many stories are
printed that the old-fashioned Oriental dentist trained himself for
tooth pulling by practising with his fingers on pulling pegs from soft
and afterward from hardwood logs, but this is true only as far as
loosened teeth are concerned. They always used forceps of some kind.
Generals Roberts and Kitchener could not, by taking thought, add one
cubit unto the stature of the British soldier, but they decreed that
he must have as good teeth as he had a rifle when on foreign service,
and so the dentists of Hongkong and other garrison ports flourish. The
British call themselves “dental surgeons.” The Chinese put out a sign
that they repair or extract molars “by best American methods.” The
Philadelphia dentist, here as over the world, leads in his calling.
One owns a leading newspaper of Hongkong. The prices of the American
dentist are high, as the tourist and five-year indentured clerk
discover. Apprentices are brought out under contract covering service,
and it is rumored that some contracts prohibit independent practise
in the same port at the end of the term; but common law has long ago
exploded the legality of a man signing away his rights to make a living.
It is strongly hoped that a cure has now been found for incipient
tubercular leprosy, hitherto supposed to be incurable. South China
has more lepers than any country, and the necessary segregation is
incomplete. Doctor J. T. Wayson, city physician of Honolulu, has used
the “beauty pencil” (stick of carbon dioxide ice), which gives a
temperature of one hundred degrees below zero, on the nodule sores,
breaking down the affected tissues time after time, until no “bacilli
leprae” are found in the tests of the cuttings from the surrounding
parts. He has found that affected children of lepers seem to have been
cured. The trial of this method will be made in the missionary and
University of Pennsylvania hospitals at Canton, which is the center
of the largest leprous district in the world, though it has had no
Robert Louis Stevenson or Father Damien eloquently to make its wants
known, as was done for the Molokai colony in Hawaii. If there is some
unknown microbic diathesis or nervous tendency to it, this remedy, like
quinine, strychnine, phosphate of iron, chaulmoogra oil, etc., may not
be a permanent success. Long years of observation only can tell. I
have gone through the leper camps and the leper boat colonies of the
Heungshan Peninsula between Canton and Macao. The colonies do not seem
to move up or down in numbers. There seems to be no danger of infection
if the visitor does not eat or handle things among them.
As I have related in _The Chinese_, the scenes are piteous beyond
words, and illustrate China’s old Spartan methods, that the sooner
incompetents pass away the better for all. It is said that a fish diet
encourages the diathesis, and certainly Heungshan is a remarkable fish
center. Doctor G. A. Hansen, of Bergen, a Norwegian bacteriologist, and
Doctors Brinckerhoff, Cumy and Hallman, of Honolulu, all discovered
the leprosy bacillus, and Doctor Hansen broke down the belief that
the disease was hereditary. By segregation, he reduced Norway’s cases
from three thousand to four hundred. The American bacteriologists are
experimenting on toxins. In 1902 an American named Conrardy established
and lived in a model endowed lazaretto with five hundred lepers
near Canton. He, of course, contracted the disease, which made slow
headway because of his vitality, which was stronger than that of the
vegetable-fed Chinese. He expected to live for fifteen years, but at
the end of eight years he was slowly sinking. On beautiful Joao Island,
which is in view from your hotel window at Macao, South China, Portugal
long ago established a leper asylum.
A careful study of the newspapers for many years must lead one to the
deduction that as the Chinese adopt foreign life in the treaty ports,
suicides are increasing among married women and business men. Probably
both religion and nerves are at fault, for they go somewhat together.
As is well known, Chinese cities and dwelling-compounds are surrounded
by walls. Unusual rains or quickly melting snows often undermine the
walls of compounds, filling the street with débris. In August, 1911,
at Mukden, Manchuria, particularly, the streets looked as though the
Russians and Japanese had again just got through with bombarding the
town! How differently everything is done in China and the Occident! The
New Jersey cities are spending some $10,000,000 to take liquid sewage
from their rivers and conduct it in a trunk sewer to New York Bay. In
China so little sewage remains after the farmer is through with its
manuring properties that British analysts concluded to take the water
supply for the three cities of Hankau, Hanyang and Wuchang, in the
center of populous China, directly from the Han River near the cities.
The extensive plant consists of a deep intake protected from the heavy
loess siltage; an air lift, which showers the water in rain into filter
beds; reservoirs of five million gallons; three Worthington pumps of
300,000 gallons an hour and an electric plant to supply the cities. The
company is Chinese, and Chinese did all the contracting by the favorite
method of piecework. As the provincial parliament was not established
when the company was chartered, the viceroy granted the franchise.
American boilers were used.
Water gathering is easy in Hongkong, though it has no river. Many
mountains of the island have been reserved and trenched at the bottom.
The torrential rains strike these peaks, and a thousand trenches
carry the water to dammed valleys at Taitam, Pokfulum and Wong Nei
Chong, high enough up in the hills to give gravity pressure for the
mains. The beautiful aqueducts on Bowen Road, far up on the mountain
side, facing the famous harbor, are a sight no tourist approaching on
his steamer will forget. When pianos are made for the humid south,
loose keys and felt, fastened without gum, must be provided for, and
even at that lamps are kept burning under the instrument to dry the
atmosphere. A case of the Korean “earth disease,” or “tochil,” is rare
in America, owing to the vigilance of our Marine Hospital Service,
but one case got into Seattle from the Orient in September, 1910. The
disease is incurable and infectious, and is much dreaded. Other races
may have forgotten, but the Orient never forgets, and always can bring
up something wonderful from the dispersion of Babel, and every camp
gathering since, along the valley of the Tarim!
An account of the quarantine practise at Hongkong and other Oriental
tropical ports may be of interest. Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Shanghai
or Nagasaki may hear or believe that there is plague or cholera at
Hongkong, and they quarantine vessels from the latter port. There
is always certain feeling between the port doctors, and Hongkong
retaliates. A vessel loaded with steerage and cabin passengers arrives
at Hongkong from one of these other ports. The yellow flag is hoisted
on the main topmast and no one is allowed to board the ship, which
lies in the stream, until the port doctor and his assistants come off
in a launch, which flies a yellow flag, and allows the ship’s yellow
flag to be hauled down. Quartermasters man the gangway and rail until
the doctor frees the vessel. He holds a conference with the ship’s
doctor, and woe betide the latter’s vessel, or its future calls up and
down the coast, if untruths are told or concealments made. The cabin
passengers are carefully watched as they march by the cabin table, and
the temperature of suspicious cases is taken. Any one who shows over
ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit is examined further for corroborative
symptoms. The temperature of every one of the steerage is taken and the
glass thermometer is not always cleaned as it is passed from mouth to
mouth here in these crowded regions! A suspicious case is stripped of
clothes then and there in the line. Despite satisfactory examinations,
vessels are sometimes held up forty-eight hours, and every one in the
steerage, as well as his baggage and quarters, is sulphur-smoked,
steamed and washed. A fumigation hulk is used for this purpose, and it
is the most hated vessel anchored in the harbor. I have known a ship’s
white officers, afflicted with plague, cholera, etc., to be taken off
to the plague hulk _Hygeia_, and their vessels to be detained fourteen
days for observation and cleansing before being released by the British
and American doctors of the port. The detention anchorage ranges on the
northwest of the usual fairway, and though a beautiful spot under the
heathen hills of old China, it is naturally considered by many as a
most melancholy one.
There is always a smouldering fire of conflict burning in the hearts
of ships’ agents, port doctors and United States Marine hospital
surgeons on duty abroad. The agents are inclined to imperfect care
and quicker despatch of vessels. The United States doctors who,
abroad, splendidly and incorruptibly guard the health of America, are
likely to injure competitive business for the sake of making safety
doubly sure. The proper course is “_in medio tutissimus ibis_.” I
have known these doctors to examine the earth around lily roots and
prohibit their export to America during many months of the year. Ships’
captains, doctors and agents, ever pressed by the management for
increased earnings, take every bit of risk they can, even in the case
of west-bound Chinese suffering from phthisis, and the check of the
United States Marine Hospital Service is salutary, and will continue to
be necessary. When a vessel is homeward bound the United States Marine
doctor at Hongkong will not give a clean bill of health for America
until all steerage passengers and their effects have been washed and
steamed in disinfecting waters. Often the emigrants are stripped and
America thus saved from loathsome hidden diseases being imported. The
scene is sometimes enough to make the doctors as sagacious as Solomon,
or as compassionate as Florence Nightingale.
What a work is opening up in China for the labors of the medical
missionary, first with the touch and then with the voice of the Angel
of Salvation. The rigid medical examination of returning Chinese at
Hongkong and San Francisco is disliked by Chinese consuls, firms and
the steerage passengers themselves, but the best friend of China, if
he is enlightened as to the unsanitary conditions yet obtaining there,
could not ask America to lighten her severity, which is no more onerous
than Japan’s, until China cleans up her land, sanitizes her houses, and
supplies herself with a modern medical system. The inspection at San
Francisco sometimes calls for lancing of the ear at night to see if the
patient is suffering from filariasis, and at Hongkong and sometimes
at San Francisco the immigrant is required to disrobe, bathe and have
his effects fumigated. The Hongkong inspection can not obviate the
wisdom of a new inspection at San Francisco to ward against hookworm,
elephantiasis, plague, cholera and the unmentionable disease.
Hongkong is ever increasing its hospital equipment, which is now the
most extensive in the Far East. Some of the buildings erected on the
mountain peaks are palatial. On the western slope of Victoria Mount
there is the worldwide known Tung Wah Hospital, managed by Chinese
educated in the medical schools of Britain, America and Hongkong. At
this hospital Doctor Sun Yat Sen, the first president of China, was
a student some years ago. Over Bowen Road, above the clouds of Mount
Wanchai, is the sumptuous Military Hospital, and at the foot of the
mountain is the no less splendid Naval Hospital. On Mount Kellett is
Sharp’s Hospital, and on Victoria Peak is the Peak Hospital. There is
the Civil Hospital, the Nethersole Hospital, hospitals over on the
mainland at Kowloon, and there will be a railroad hospital at Kowloon.
Canton has copied from Hongkong. The Chinese there are modernizing
their ancient guild hospitals which lie outside of the eastern wall.
Philanthropy in only the smallest of the Hongkong hospitals has been
depended upon, most of them being municipal or service hospitals. At
Canton is the immense Doctor Peter Parker Hospital, founded in 1835,
for which the American Presbyterian women of Philadelphia furnish
the medical missionaries. There are 300 beds, and 25,000 patients
are treated annually. The Chinese do their part, having presented a
building for a medical college. The Gregg Hospitals for Women at Canton
is presided over by Doctors Mary Fulton and Mary Niles, and the Chinese
have given $3,500 for a children’s ward. At Kowkiang, on the Yangtze,
there is the model Danforth Memorial Hospital, erected with American
money and presided over by a noted Chinese lady physician who has taken
the name of Miss Mary Stone, and who graduated from the University of
Michigan Medical School.
In remote large Hainan Island, in Suchow, at Paoting, Chingtu, Peking,
etc., there are American Presbyterian hospitals. Where there are now
hundreds there will soon be thousands of medical missionaries and more
medical colleges to fit the Chinese to help themselves. It is the most
important work in China,--more important even than foreign loans for
railways and industrials, and far more important than loans for armies
and navies. Doctor F. C. Yen, of Yale Medical College, Changsha, is a
fine example of a native medical man, trained in the best that the West
knows. Several American universities have opened medical schools in
China, the University of Pennsylvania at Canton, Yale at Changsha in
stern conservative Hunan province; and now Harvard proposes to open
a medical school possibly at Shanghai, to be staffed by the Harvard
Medical School, and the diseases which they will attack are China’s
curses, the dangers of the world,--the skin diseases, tumors, the
two plagues, cholera, dysentery, leprosy, malaria and consumption.
One-third of the money for the Scotch Presbyterian Hospital and medical
college at Mukden was contributed by the Chinese, who now warmly
appreciate Western medicine.
The day is not distant when the Chinese, placed on their feet in
finance, will pay half the expense of medical missions. The Chinese
give liquorice to men and animals as a cure for wasting diseases.
From the skin of a venomous toad their doctors derive a preparation
which they call Sen-so. It is a far more powerful stimulus to heart
action than our drug digitalis. It is well known that deer’s horns
are ground to powder by the old-fashioned Chinese doctors. In the
valley of the Wei River, just north of the Peling range in far western
Kansu province, stags are raised in enclosures for this purpose. The
soft prongs of the horn are cut off in summer time. The old-fashioned
doctors of China never dissected, as abuse of the body is contrary to
Confucianism. They knew nothing of circulation, and little of anatomy,
physiology or chemistry. “Then Confucianism must go,” say the new
Chinese scientists. Two of their medical proverbs are:
“A physician may cure every disease except the disease of Fate.”
“Send for the diagnostician before the druggist, for the cure must fit
the disease.”
Four great tropical medicine colleges have been opened outside of
the Orient. The first was the University of Liverpool School. Then
followed the London School of Tropical Medicine, and the Hamburg School
of the Germans. Now the New York Tropical Medical School has been
opened at Twentieth Street and Second Avenue. The work will include
the translation of text-books, and America will be able to do much
for Southern China in the clinic on ships which the school will have
as soon as the Panama Canal is open. Serums have yet to be found for
the paralyzing dengue which every foreigner in China has suffered from
at one time or another: typhus, anæmia, dum-dum, tze-tze, sleeping
sickness, amoebic dysentery, malaria and pneumonic plague, though the
indefatigable Doctor Kitasato found a temporary serum for the last
named.
The medical works translated into Chinese by medical missionaries
include the following: Doctor J. G. Kerr’s (first teacher of Doctor
Sunyacius) translation of Bartholow’s _Practise of Medicine_, Doctor
S. A. Hunter’s translation of a _Materia Medica and Pharmacopœia_,
Doctor Dudgeon’s translation of Gray’s _Anatomy_, Doctor Porter’s
translation of a physiology, Doctor Mary Fulton’s _Diseases of
Children_; _Nursing in Surgery_, and _Gynecology_, etc.
When I think of the trials of the Orient in its heated, humid,
equatorial region, where I lived for three years; and the hardships,
dangers and life-remembered punishment of its unavoidable, various
diseases, I am inclined to suggest in this book the formation of an
“Equator Club,” eligibility for membership in which shall be at least
two years’ uninterrupted residence between the tropics of Cancer and
Capricorn. Such an experience was certainly a unique and trying one,
a tremendous test of physique, as a growing number, who have endured
it, will confess, and a perpetuated remembrance of those days, and an
interest in the successors who have followed one to take up the white
man’s growing burdens in those realms of the imperious sun, would
certainly do good.
XXVII
CHINESE WOMANHOOD
On the last of our August the women of China celebrate the festival of
the goddess of needlework. The interesting legend told to the daughters
of the house is as follows: This goddess, because of her wonderful
skill, was given by the great god Tien to a worthy farmer. After
this life she incurred the wrath of the god and was removed from her
husband’s star. Once a year, when her star comes round again, magpies
conduct her back to her husband’s star home, across the carpet of the
Milky Way, where she is welcome for a while, because she is as good a
needleworker as he is a farmer and provider. The festival includes the
exhibition on a table of the needlework of the women and the toy work
of the girls. Wonderful toys of gummed sesame seeds, wax and paper are
made, and toys worked by clockwork or heat, which exhibit all kinds
of rural life,--some of it humorous. From behind screens the women
listen to what the men callers have to say to the head of the family
in praise of their handiwork. It is, however, principally a women’s
festival and encourages the production of the gorgeous embroidery of
the Chinese. A Chinese wit was asked the difference in the position
of Chinese and Anglo-Saxon women, and she replied: “An Oriental man
beats his wife in public to show that he is indeed the ruler, but he
pets her in private, whereas a Western man pets his wife in public and
beats her in private.” I do not know what the remote Tibet men do
with their powerful women in private, but I do know that the women of
Tibet who come down into Szechuen and Yunnan provinces with the trading
trains are on an equal with man. They join him in work, play, in
meeting strangers and in holding the “cash,” and therefore are the most
independent of the Chinese women. They do not bind their feet, as they
have too much work to do. They come next to the Tonquinoise as perhaps
the best-looking of the Chinese. The best dressed women in China live
in Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces. The dress of Korean women is not so
gorgeous as the Chinese dress, the former wearing green or white, and
hiding their heads in immense basket hats, “to keep them from flirting”
the wits say! The Korean woman at home, instead of modestly screening
her face with a fan, does so by lifting up her wide sleeve. Muffs and
gloves are not worn in the cold north. Instead, the wide long sleeve is
gathered round the hand.
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Lighting China’s sea-ways by the National Customs Department. This
is the Guia Light. Note the winding rock path, cut to the summit;
Kwangtung province.
]
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Modern buildings of brick. Nearly all have large verandas. Canton
water-front, Pearl River.]
[Illustration:
Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The Chinese type of girlhood, as contrasted with the Japanese type
shown in another photograph. In the New China the compressing of
feet is taboo.
]
The campaign of the Tien Tsu Hui (As-Heaven-Made-It Foot Society)
against foot-binding is meeting with much success. Chinese women are
rejoicing that they are not withheld from physical freedom and an
education, by being longer crippled. The idea that a bound foot is the
surest sign of a lady, and the best recommendation for marriage, is
dying out. As prices increase with the material development of China,
men will not be able to hire servants to carry and wait on these
crippled women. Therefore economy will advance the reform also. The
famous viceroy of Wuchang, Chang Chih Tung, who died in 1909, was the
first prominent Chinese official to become converted to the reform.
The late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi joined the movement. It is a pity
that more Chinese girls from the Yangtze and southern provinces do not
come to American and European schools, as their work, on returning
to China, would do most for this reform. The snobbish idea, of course,
was that a girl who never needed to work, and had never worked, made
a very select wife, just as in America and Britain the “snobs” think
that a girl who has never worked, and can not work, makes a finer wife
than a woman who has been or is in business. The French have thought
otherwise for a long time. One of the pioneer foreign women, outside of
the missionaries, who worked and lectured in China for the unbinding of
feet, was Mrs. Archibald Little, author of _The Land of the Blue Gown_,
and wife of the intrepid Yangtze explorer and author.
The following love tale is the one oftenest painted on your teacup
and saucer, and other Chinese pottery, and on fans, etc. Kung She is
the sweet and lovely daughter of a rich man. She falls in love with
her father’s bright and brave young secretary, who has more in rosy
prospect and dreams than in lined pocket. The father proposes that
the daughter shall, against her will, marry a rich old suitor. The
lovers in desperation elope over a bamboo bridge to an island pavilion
of willow wood, with beautiful up-curving eaves. The wrathful suitor
follows and burns the pavilion and the bridge. The souls of the lovers
take refuge in the bodies of two doves which are seen cooing from the
branches of a banyan that grows above the pavilion. Thus we sit down
to eat, and we fan ourselves each day over a beautiful love tale of
romantic old China.
The queue is now going out as man’s head-dress in republican China.
The general custom with Chinese women is to dress the hair out behind,
sticking in large-headed gold pins; and the Manchu’s dress it over
the ear, with the help of wide pins, and broad ribbons and flowers.
The aboriginal tribes of Lolos in Szechuen province, and Miao Tszes
in Kweichau province, dress the hair on top of the head over rats, in
true Western cone-style. The Chinese women oil their hair and brush it
out smooth on forms. The only departure from this is a straight bang
allowed to girls. They wonder if we have brushes or combs in the West,
and point to our curls (called “rough dog”) as a proof of our tonsorial
carelessness.
Some of the proverbs of the women are:
“You can not tell a good husband that his wife has a defect.”
“Ugly and beautiful daughters all have one face to a true mother.”
“A man weds a wife for her goodness, but a concubine for her face.”
“Mother’s love is even in beasts, for the hungriest tiger will not eat
its whelps.”
“Deeds are better than admiration.”
“A virtuous wife is like a loyal statesman; she knows only one king,
her husband.”
“Mother and father first and wealth after.”
“She is dead indeed who walks around with a dead heart.”
“If you listen to every one’s advice, the picture will never be
straight on the wall.”
“Let thy purse and not thine eyes tell thee what to buy.”
“You can’t expect the looking glass to reveal more than you put into
it.”