An ordinary road it is, and passing over it the ordinary
procession--heavy-wheeled carts drawn by humped, white bullocks; crowded
jutkas whose tough, little ponies disappear in a rattle of wheels and a
cloud of dust; weddings, funerals, and festivals with processions gay or
mournful as the case may be. One feature alone distinguishes this road
from others of its kind; once a week its dusty length is traversed by a
visitant from the West, a "Tin Lizzie," whose unoccupied spaces are
piled high with medicine chests and instrument cases. Once a week the
Doctor passes by, and the countryside turns out to meet her.
When the Doctor Passes by.
Where do they come from, the pathetic groups that continually bring the
little Ford to a halt? For long stretches the road passes through
apparently uninhabited country, yet here they are, the lame, the halt,
and the blind, as though an unseen city were pouring out the dregs of
its slums. Back a mile from the road, among the tamarind trees, stands
one village; at the edge of the rice fields huddles another. The roofs
of thatch or earth-brown tiles seem an indistinguishable part of the
landscape, but they are there, each with its quota of child-birth pain,
its fever-burnings, its germ-borne epidemics where sanitation is
unknown, its final pangs of dissolution. But once a week the Doctor
passes by.
What do she and her attendants treat? Sore eyes and scabies and all the
dirt-carried minor ailments that infect the village; malaria from the
mosquitoes that swarm among the rice fields; aching teeth to be pulled;
dreaded epidemics of cholera or typhoid, small pox or plague. Now and
then the back seat is cleared of its _impedimenta_ and turned into the
fraction of an ambulance to convey a groaning patient to a clean bed in
the hospital ward. Once at least a makeshift operating table has been
set up under the shade of a roadside banyan tree, and the Scriptural
injunction, "If thy foot offend thee, cut it off," carried out then and
there to the saving of a life.
At dark the plucky little Ford plods gallantly back to the home base,
its occupants with faded garlands, whose make-up varies with the
seasons--yellow chrysanthemums with purple everlasting tassels at
Christmas time; in the dry, hot days of spring pink and white oleanders
from the water channels among the hills; during the rains the heavy
fragrance of jasmine. All the flowers do their brave best for the day
when the Doctor passes by.
Where no Doctor Passes by.
But what of the roads on which the Doctor never passes? From Vellore's
fortress-crowned hills they stretch north and south, east and west, and
toward all the intermediate points of the compass. Every city of India
forms such a nucleus for the country around. Amid the wheat fields of
the Punjab, under the tamarinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus
pools and bamboo clusters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black cotton
fields of the Deccan are the roads and the villages, the villages and
the roads. Some mathematically minded writer once computed that, if
Christ in the days of His flesh had started on a tour among the villages
of India, visiting one each day, to-day in the advancing years of the
twentieth century many would yet be waiting, unenlightened and
unvisited. Few have been visited by any modern follower of the Great
Physician. Who can compute their sum total of human misery, of
preventable disease, of undernourishment, of pain that might all too
easily he alleviated?
[Illustration: Kamala (Lotus Flower), Winner of The Gold Medal in
Anatomy in Vellore Medical School]
[Illustration: A Little Lost One--What Will Such Girls Do for India?
CONTRASTS]
A Problem In Multiplication.
Was it, one wonders, the memory of the Gudiyattam road, and those like
it in nameless thousands, that burned deep into Dr. Ida Scudder's heart
and brain the desire to found a Medical School, where the American
Doctor might multiply herself and reproduce her life of skillful and
devoted service in the lives of hundreds of Indian women physicians? It
is the only way that the message of the Good Physician, His healing for
soul and body, may penetrate those village fastnesses of dirt, disease,
and ignorance. One hundred and sixty women doctors at present try to
minister to India's one hundred and sixty millions of women, shut out by
immemorial custom from men's hospitals and from physicians who are men.
"What are these among so many?" What can they ever be except as they may
multiply themselves in the persons of Indian messengers of healing?
Small Beginnings.
And so, in July, 1918, the Vellore Medical School was opened, under the
fostering care of four contributing Mission Boards, and with the
approval and aid of the Government of Madras. "Go ahead if you can find
six students who have completed the High School Course," said the
interested Surgeon General. Instead of six, sixty-nine applied;
seventeen were accepted; and fourteen not only survived the inevitable
weeding out process, but brought to the school at the end of the first
year the unheard of distinction of one hundred per cent, of passes in
the Government examination. That famous first class is now in its Senior
Year, and by the time this book comes from the press will be scattering
itself among thirteen centres of help and health.
And so, in rented buildings, the Medical School started life. If ever an
institution passed its first year in a hand-to-mouth existence, this one
has. Short of funds save as mercifully provided by private means; short
of doctors for the staff; short of buildings in which to house its
increasing student body, for it has grown from fourteen to sixty-seven;
short, in fine, of everything needed except faith and enthusiasm and
hard work on the part of its founders, it has yet gone on; the girls
have been housed, classes have been taught, examinations passed, and the
first class is ready to go out into the world of work.
Just here perhaps one brief explanation should be made. These girls will
not be _doctors_ in the narrowly technical sense, for the Government of
India reserves the doctor's degree for such students as have first taken
a college diploma and then on top of it a still more demanding medical
course of five years. These students will receive the degree of Licensed
Medical Practitioner (L.M.P.) which authorizes them to practise medicine
and surgery and even to be in charge of a hospital. The full college
may come, we hope, not many years hence, when funds become available.
Meantime, this school will year by year be turning out its quota of
medical workers whose usefulness cannot be over-estimated.
[Illustration: FIRST BUILDING AT NEW MEDICAL SCHOOL, VELLORE, WHICH IS
HOUSING OUR STUDENTS]
A Visit to Vellore.
Let us pay a visit to the School and see it as it is in its present
state of makeshift. Since its beginning it has dwelt, like Paul the
prisoner, "in its own hired house," but Paul's epistles tell of no such
uncertainty in his tenure of his rented dwelling, as that which has
afflicted this institution. The housing shortage which has distressed
New York has reached even to Vellore. Two rented bungalows were lost,
and, as an emergency measure, the future Nurses' Home was erected in
great haste on the town site and at once utilized as a dormitory with
some rooms set aside for lectures as well.
Corpses--and Children.
Let us first pay a visit to "Pentland," the one remaining "hired house,"
in which the Freshmen have their home with Dr. Mary Samuel, the Indian
member of the staff, as their house mother. Just behind it is the
thatched shed, carefully walled in, which serves as the dissecting room.
To the uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, for
cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables. The casual visitor
sympathizes with the Hindu student who confides to you that during her
first days of work in the dissecting room she could only sleep when
firmly flanked by a friend on each side of her "to keep off the spirits
that walk by night." After a few weeks of experience, however, the
fascinating search for nerve and muscle, tendon, vein, and artery
becomes the dominating state of consciousness, and the scientific spirit
excludes all resentment at the disagreeable.
Pentland Compound possesses another feature in pleasing contrast to the
dissecting shed. As you come away from a session there and close the
door of the enclosing wall, from the opposite end of the compound comes
the sound of children's voices in play. There in a comfortable Indian
cottage lives the jolly family of the Children's Home. They are a merry,
well-nourished collection of waifs and strays, of all ancestries, Hindu,
Muhammadan, and Christian, mostly gathered in through the wards of the
Mission Hospitals. Only an experienced social worker could estimate what
such a home means in the prevention of future disease, beggary, and
crime. It is good for the medical students to live in close
neighborliness with this bit of actual service. One student in writing
of her future plans mentions that, as an "avocation" in the chinks of
her hospital work, she plans to raise private funds and found a little
orphanage all her own!
Early Rising.
Not far from Pentland are the new buildings of Voorhees College
belonging to the Arcot Mission of the Dutch Reformed Church. For the
resent, the Medical School has the loan of its lecture rooms and
laboratories in the early morning hours before the boys' classes begin.
That means seven o'clock classes, and previous to that for most of the
students a mile walk from the town dormitory. Here is the Chemistry
Laboratory. Freshmen toil over the puzzling behavior of atoms and
electrons, while in lecture rooms the ear of the uninstructed visitor is
puzzled by the technical vocabularies of the classes in anatomy and
surgery, and one wonders how the Indian student ever achieves this vast
amount of information through the difficult medium of a foreign tongue.
[Illustration: DR. SCUDDER AND THE MEDICAL STUDENTS AT VELLORE.]
In Hospital Wards.
Next in our path of visitation comes Schell Hospital, where the theories
learned in dissecting room, laboratory, and lecture are connected up
with actual relief of sick women and children. Here the students are
divided into small groups and many kinds of clinical demonstrations are
going on at once. In the compounding room you will see a lesson in
pill-making. That smiling young person working away on the floor in
front of the table is a West Coast Brahman, sent on a stipend from the
Hindu state of Travancore. It is her first experience away from home and
the zest and adventure of the new life have already fired her spirit.
In this verandah another group are at work with bandaging. We watch them
while brown arms and legs, heads and bodies disappear under complicated
layers of white gauze.
In the large ward Seniors, equipped with head mirrors and stethoscopes,
with chart and pen, are taking down patients' histories and suggesting
diagnoses. Soon it will be their work to do this unaided, and every bit
of supervised practice is laying up stores of experience for the future.
On the next verandah Doctor Findlay is giving a lecture and
demonstration on the care and feeding of babies. Demonstration is not
difficult, for the hospital always provides an abundance of ailing
infants whose regulated diet and consequently improving health serve as
laboratory tests.
The Ford in a New Capacity.
Now we follow the shady verandah around three sides of the attractive
courtyard with its trees and flowering creepers. At the far end the
class in obstetrics is going on. And behold, the irrepressible Ford has
entered into a new province. This truly American product will probably
be found to-day in every continent and nearly every country in the
world, but one ventures to prophesy that Vellore is the only spot on the
habitable globe where its cast-off tires have been metamorphosed into
models of human organs! Every student not working over an actual mother
or baby is busy performing on these home-made rubber models the
operations she may some day be called to do upon a living patient.
In the midst of these Dr. Griscom is interrupted by next ward that
didn't cry for a week? You know that this morning you slapped it and it
cried for the first time, and its mother was very happy. Now she wants
to hear it cry again, and says--"may she please beat it herself?" The
Doctor leaves her Ford tires, and runs to the ward to explain to the
overzealous mother the difference between _massage_ administered by a
physician and the ordinary manner of "beating" a baby.
[Illustration: Interior of the Temple Where God is a Stone Image]
[Illustration: Interior of the Hospital Where God is Love]
Our next place of pilgrimage is the "town site" where the new Nurses'
Home affords temporary dormitory accommodation. Beside it is the
Doctor's bungalow, and in the open space next is to be built the big
dispensary. This is well called the "town site," for it is in the thick
of Vellore's population. Children, dogs, and donkeys swarm across its
precincts, and there is no fear of these students being separated from
the actualities of Indian life. The two-story buildings, however, give
abundant opportunity for the occupants to "lift up their eyes unto the
hills"; and the open air sleeping-rooms promise breezes in the hottest
nights.
"Mrs. Earth Thou-Art."
Here, too, the Seniors have their lectures in obstetrics, and with the
beginning of that course a new difficulty arose. Equipment here, as in
practically every Mission institution, is pitifully limited by lack of
funds. For the proper teaching of obstetrics there is need of a pelvic
manikin, lifesize. There were no funds to spare for so expensive a piece
of apparatus, and, if there had been, there would have been a delay of
months in getting it out from England or America. But meantime
obstetrics must be taught, and a manikin must be had. "Necessity is the
mother of invention." Necessity got to work, and "Mrs. Earth-Thou-Art"
is the result. Dr. Griscom sent for the potter, who left his wheel in
the bazaar and came to this market for new wares. After long and
detailed instructions, he returned to his wheel, and set it to the
making of a shape never seen in the potter's vision of Jeremiah or
Robert Browning. The first attempt was a failure; the second and third
were equally useless; at last something was produced that approximated
the human size and form. The tires of the Ford were again requisitioned
and, by the miraculous aid of the blacksmith, nailed to the pottery
figure without wrecking the latter. "Mrs. Earth-Thou-Art" at last
reposed complete, one example of the triumph of the missionary teacher
over the handicaps of the situation. We hope that her brittle clay will
survive until such time as some friend from across the sea is moved to
provide for her a "store-made" successor.
"That which shall be."
One more spot must be visited before our pilgrimage ends. No guest of
the Medical School is ever allowed to depart without a visit to "the
site," that pride of Dr. Ida Scudder and her staff.
Three miles out from the dust and noise of the bazaars lies this tract
of fertile land, the near hills rising even within its boundaries, the
heights of Kylasa forming a mountain wall against the sunset. Here in
the midst of natural beauty, open to every wind of heaven, the
dormitories, lecture room, chapel, and new hospital will rise. It will
mean a healthful home, with the freedom of country life and endless
opportunity for games and walks. The motor ambulances will form the
daily connecting link with the practical work of dispensary and
emergency hospital.
"Who's Who."
We have spoken much of buildings and courses of study, but little of the
girls themselves. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why are they
here? What are their future plans?
They are girls of many shades of belief, from many classes of society.
The great majority are, of course, Protestant Christians, representing
the work of almost every Mission Board to be found in South India. There
are a few Roman Catholics, and about an equal number of members of the
indigenous Syrian Christian community. Nine are Hindus, including one
Brahman. They come from the remotest corners of the Madras Presidency,
and some from even beyond its borders.
Why did they come? There are some who frankly admit that their entrance
into Medical School was due solely to the influence of parents and
relatives, and that their present vital interest in what they are doing
dates back not to any childhood desire for the doctor's profession, but
only to the stimulating experiences of the school itself. Others tell of
a life-long wish for what the school has made possible; still others of
"sudden conversion" to medicine, brought about by a realization of need,
or in one case to the chance advice of a school friend. Two speak of the
appalling need of their own home villages, where no medical help for
women has ever been known. Some of the students have expressed their
reasons in their own words:--
"Once I had a severe attack of influenza and was taken to the General
Hospital, Madras. I have heard people say that nurses and doctors are
not good to the patients. But, contrary to my idea, the English and
Eurasian nurses there were very good and kind to me, more than I
expected. I used to see the students of the Medical College of Madras
paying visits to all the patients, some of whom were waiting for
mornings when they should meet their medical friends. I saw all the
work that they did. The nurses were very busy helping patients and,
whatever trouble the patients gave, they never got cross with them. They
used to sing to some of them at night, give toys to little ones and thus
coax every one to make them take medicine. I admired the kindness and
goodness that all the medical workers with whom I came in contact
possessed. As medical work began to interest me, I used to read
magazines about medical work. Again, when I once went to Karimnagar, I
saw ever so many children and women, uncared for and not being loved by
high caste people. I wanted to help Indians very much. All these things
made me join the Medical School.
"My father's desire was that one of his daughters should study medicine
and work in the hospital where he worked for twenty years, and so in
order to fulfill his desire I made up my mind to learn medicine.
"Now my father is dead and the hospital in which he had worked is
closed, for there is no one to take his place. So all are very glad to
see that I am learning medicine. There are many men doctors in Ceylon,
but very few lady doctors and I think that God has given me a good
opportunity to work for Him.
"For a long time I did not know much about the sufferings of my country
women without proper aid of medical women. One day I happened to attend
a meeting held by some Indian ladies and one European. They spoke about
the great need of women doctors in India and all about the sufferings of
my sisters. One fact struck me more than anything else. It was about an
untrained mid-wife who treated a woman very cruelly, but ignorantly.
From that time I made up my mind to study medicine with the aim of
becoming a loving doctor. My wish is now that all the women doctors
should be real Christian doctors with real love and sympathizing hearts
for the patients.
"When I told my parents that I wanted to study medicine, they and my
relatives objected and scolded me, for they were afraid that I would not
marry if I would study medicine. In India they think meanly of a person,
especially a girl, who is not married at the proper age. I want now to
show my people that it is not mean to remain unmarried. This is my
second aim which came from the first."
[Illustration: A MEDICAL STUDENT IN VELLORE]