MAINLY ABOUT CHINESE DOCTORS.
Chaotong is an important centre for the distribution of medicines to
Szechuen and other parts of the empire. An extraordinary variety of
drugs and medicaments is collected in the city. No pharmacopoeia is more
comprehensive than the Chinese. No English physician can surpass the
Chinese in the easy confidence with which he will diagnose symptoms that
he does not understand. The Chinese physician who witnesses the
unfortunate effect of placing a drug of which he knows nothing into a
body of which he knows less, is no more disconcerted than is his Western
brother under similar circumstances; he retires, sententiously observing
"there is medicine for sickness but none for fate." "Medicine," says the
Chinese proverb, "cures the man who is fated not to die." "When Yenwang
(the King of Hell) has decreed a man to die at the third watch, no power
will detain him till the fifth."
The professional knowledge of a Chinese doctor largely consists in
ability to feel the pulse, or rather the innumerable pulses of his
Chinese patient. This is the real criterion of his skill. The pulses of
a Chinaman vary in a manner that no English doctor can conceive of. For
instance, among the seven kinds of pulse which presage approaching
death, occur the five following:--
"1. When the pulse is perceived under the fingers to bubble irregularly
like water over a great fire, if it be in the morning, the patient will
die in the evening.
"2. Death is no farther off if the pulse seems like a fish whose head is
stopped in such a manner that he cannot move, but has a frisking tail
without any regularity; the cause of this distemper lies in the kidneys.
"3. If the pulse seems like drops of water that fall into a room through
some crack, and when in its return it is scattered and disordered much
like the twine of a cord which is unravelled, the bones are dried up
even to the very marrow.
"4. Likewise if the motion of the pulse resembles the pace of a frog
when he is embarrassed in the weeds, death is certain.
"5. If the motion of the pulse resembles the hasty pecking of the beak
of a bird, there is a defect of spirits in the stomach."
Heredity is the most important factor in the evolution of a doctor in
China, success in his career as an "hereditary physician" being
specially assured to him who has the good fortune to make his first
appearance in the world feet foremost. Doctors dispense their own
medicines. In their shops you see an amazing variety of drugs; you will
occasionally also see tethered a live stag, which on a certain day, to
be decided by the priests, will be pounded whole in a pestle and mortar.
"Pills manufactured out of a whole stag slaughtered with purity of
purpose on a propitious day," is a common announcement in dispensaries
in China. The wall of a doctor's shop is usually stuck all over with
disused plasters returned by grateful patients with complimentary
testimonies to their efficiency; they have done what England is alleged
to expect of all her sons--their duty.
Medicines, it is known to all Chinamen, operate variously according to
their taste, thus:--"All sour medicines are capable of impeding and
retaining; bitter medicines of causing looseness and warmth as well as
hardening; sweet possess the qualities of strengthening, of harmonising,
and of warming; acids disperse, prove emollient, and go in an athwart
direction; salt medicines possess the properties of descending; those
substances that are hard and tasteless open the orifices of the body and
promote a discharge. This explains the use of the five tastes."
Coming from Szechuen, we frequently met porters carrying baskets of
armadillos, leopard skins, leopard and tiger bones. The skins were for
wear, but the armadillos and bones were being taken to Suifu to be
converted into medicine. From the bones of leopards an admirable tonic
may be distilled; while it is well known that the infusion prepared from
tiger bones is the greatest of the tonics, conferring something of the
courage, agility, and strength of the tiger upon its partaker.
Another excellent specific for courage is a preparation made from the
gall bladder of a robber famous for his bravery, who has died at the
hands of the executioner. The sale of such a gall bladder is one of the
perquisites of a Chinese executioner.
Ague at certain seasons is one of the most common ailments of the
district of Chaotong, yet there is an admirable prophylactic at hand
against it: write the names of the eight demons of ague on paper, and
then eat the paper with a cake; or take out the eyes of the paper
door-god (there are door-gods on all your neighbours' doors), and devour
them--this remedy never fails.
Unlike the Spaniard, the Chinese disapproves of blood-letting in fevers,
"for a fever is like a pot boiling; it is requisite to reduce the fire
and not diminish the liquid in the vessel, if we wish to cure the
patient."
Unlike the Spaniard, too, the Chinese doctors would not venture to
assert, as the medical faculty of Madrid in the middle of last century
assured the inhabitants, that "if human excrement was no longer to be
suffered to accumulate as usual in the streets, where it might attract
the putrescent particles floating in the air, these noxious vapours
would find their way into the human body and a pestilential sickness
would be the inevitable consequence."
For boils there is a certain cure:--There is a God of Boils. If you have
a boil you will plaster the offending excrescence without avail, if that
be _all_ you plaster; to get relief you must at the same time plaster
the corresponding area on the image of the God. Go into his temple in
Western China, and you will find this deity dripping with plasters, with
scarcely an undesecrated space on his superficies.
At the yamen of the Brigadier-General in Chaotong, the entrance is
guarded by the customary stone images of mythical shape and grotesque
features. They are believed to represent lions, but their faces are not
leonine--they are a reproduction, exaggerated, of the characteristic
features of the bulldog of Western China. The images are of undoubted
value to the city. One is male and the other female. On the sixteenth
day of the first month they are visited by the townspeople, who rub them
energetically with their hands, all over from end to end. Every spot so
touched confers immunity from pain upon the corresponding region of
their own bodies for the ensuing year. And so from year to year these
images are visited. Pain accordingly is almost absent from the city,
and only that man suffers pain who has the temerity to neglect the
opportunity of insuring himself against it.
I was called to a case of opium-poisoning in Chaotong. A son came in
casually to seek our aid in saving his father, who had attempted suicide
with a large over-dose of opium. He had taken it at ten in the morning
and it was now two. We were led to the house and found it a single small
unlit room up a narrow alley. In the room two men were unconcernedly
eating their rice, and in the darkness they seemed to be the only
occupants; but, lying down behind them on a narrow bed, was the dim
figure of the dying man, who was breathing stertorously. A crowd quickly
gathered round the door and pent up the alley-way. Rousing the man, I
caused him to swallow some pints of warm water, and then I gave him a
hypodermic injection of apomorphia. The effect was admirable, and
pleased the spectators even more than the patient.
Opium is almost exclusively the drug used by suicides. No Chinaman would
kill himself by the mutilation of the razor or pistol-shot because awful
is the future punishment of him who would so dare to disturb the
integrity of the body bequeathed to him by his fathers.
China is the land of suicides. I suppose more people die from suicide in
China in proportion to the population than in any other country. Where
the struggle for existence is so keen, it is hardly to be wondered at
that men are so willing to abandon the struggle. But poverty and misery
are not the only causes. For the most trivial reason the Chinaman will
take his own life. Suicide with a Chinaman is an act that is recorded in
his honour rather than to his opprobrium.
Thus a widow, as we have seen, may obtain much merit by sacrificing
herself on the death of her husband. But in a large proportion of cases
the motive is revenge, for the spirit of the dead is believed to "haunt
and injure the living person who has been the cause of the suicide." In
China to ruin your adversary you injure or kill yourself. To vow to
commit suicide is the most awful threat with which you can drive terror
into the heart of your adversary. If your enemy do you wrong, there is
no way in which you can cause him more bitterly to repent his misdeed
than by slaying yourself at his doorstep. He will be charged with your
murder, and may be executed for the crime; he will be utterly ruined in
establishing, if he can establish, his innocence; and he will be haunted
ever after by your avenging spirit.
Occasionally two men who have quarrelled will take poison together, and
their spirits will fight it out in heaven. Opium is very cheap in
Chaotong, costing only fivepence an ounce for the crude article. You see
it exposed for sale everywhere, like thick treacle in dirty besmeared
jars. It is largely adulterated with ground pigskin, the adulteration
being detected by the craving being unsatisfied. Mohammedans have a holy
loathing of the pig, and look with contempt on their countrymen whose
chief meat-food is pork. But each one in his turn. It is, on the other
hand, a source of infinite amusement to the Chinese to see his
Mohammedan brother unwittingly smoking the unclean beast in his
opium-pipe.
On our way to the opium case we passed a doorway from which pitiful
screams were issuing. It was a mother thrashing her little boy with a
heavy stick--she had tethered him by the leg and was using the stick
with both hands. A Chinese proverb as old as the hills tells you, "if
you love your son, give him plenty of the cudgel; if you hate him, cram
him with delicacies." He was a young wretch, she said, and she could do
nothing with him; and she raised her baton again to strike, but the
missionary interposed, whereupon she consented to stay her wrath and did
so--till we were round the corner.
"Extreme lenity alternating with rude passion in the treatment of
children is the characteristic," says Meadows, "of the lower stages of
civilisation." I mention this incident only because of its rarity. In no
other country in the world, civilised or "heathen," are children
generally treated with more kindness and affection than they are in
China. "Children, even amongst seemingly stolid Chinese, have the
faculty of calling forth the better feelings so often found latent.
Their prattle delights the fond father, whose pride beams through every
line of his countenance, and their quaint and winning ways and touches
of nature are visible even under the disadvantages of almond eyes and
shaven crowns" (Dyer Ball).
A mother in China is given, both by law and custom, extreme power over
her sons whatever their age or rank. The Sacred Edict says, "Parents are
like heaven. Heaven produces a blade of grass. Spring causes it to
germinate. Autumn kills it with frost. Both are by the will of heaven.
In like manner the power of life and death over the body which they have
begotten is with the parents."
And it is this law giving such power to a mother in China which tends,
it is believed, to nullify that other law whereby a husband in China is
given extreme power over his wife, even to the power in some cases of
life and death.
The Mohammedans are still numerous in Chaotong, and there are some 3000
families--the figures are Chinese--in the city and district. Their
numbers were much reduced during the suppression of the rebellion of
1857-1873, when they suffered the most awful cruelties. Again, thirteen
years ago, there was an uprising which was suppressed by the Government
with merciless severity. One street is exclusively occupied by Moslems,
who have in their hands the skin trade of the city. Their houses are
known by a conspicuous absence from door and window of the coloured
paper door-gods that are seen grotesquely glaring from the doors of the
unbelievers. Their mosque is well cared for and unusually clean. In the
centre, within the main doorway, as in every mosque in the empire, is a
gilt tablet of loyalty to the living Emperor. "May the Emperor reign ten
thousand years!" it says, a token of subjection which the mosques of
Yunnan have especially been compelled to display since the insurrection.
At the time of my visit an aged mollah was teaching Arabic and the Koran
to a ragged handful of boys. He spoke to me through an interpreter, and
gave me the impression of having some little knowledge of things outside
the four seas that surround China. I told him that I had lived under the
shelter of two of the greatest mosques, but he seemed to question my
contention that the mosque in Cordova and the Karouin mosque in Fez are
even more noble in their proportions than his mosque in Chaotong. In
some of the skin-hongs that I entered, the walls were ornamented with
coloured plans of Mecca and Medinah, bought in Chentu, the capital city
of the province of Szechuen.