I wish it were possible for me to give you some idea of the
amount of suffering and misery there is in India to-day; but I
fear that I can not do it, for you have seldom been where you
could not obtain the services of a good physician in time of
need, or even be taken to a hospital, if it were desirable.
But there are millions of people in India who have no such
resources as that. Shall I tell you of a man who came to our
hospital some time ago suffering from a cataract in one eye?
He was an intelligent man, well educated, and he wanted to
save his eyesight. He employed some of the native doctors to
treat the eye, and when he came to us he said that he thought
he had had at least twenty-five pounds of medicine put in his
eye. That sounded like such a large story that we asked for
the particulars, and I think he was about right. It was all to
no purpose, however, so that he changed doctors and got a new
remedy that was guaranteed. They opened his eye and sifted it
full of pounded glass. If you have ever had a cinder in your
eye, perhaps you can to some small extent imagine the agonies
which that man endured before he came to us. That is not an
uncommon case, and frequently when I go into the dispensary in
the morning I find there mothers with their little children.
They hold them out to me in their arms and say, “Won’t you look
at this child’s eyes?” I say, “Well, mother, what is the matter
with the eyes?” “Oh, about two or three weeks ago the child’s
eyes were red and it cried a little bit, and we tried to open
them to see what was the matter, but the child made so much fuss
we couldn’t do anything. Now, they have been shut so long that
we are afraid there is something the matter; we want you to look
and see.” I open those eyelids with my fingers; I know what I am
going to see. The front part of the eyeball is gone--sloughed
away, rotted out just in those few days. A few simple remedies,
a little cleanliness at the proper time, would have saved those
eyes, but often I have to say to those mothers, “Your child
is blind for life.” There are many thousands of such little
children in India to-day sitting by the side of the road waiting
for the coppers which the passer-by will fling to them, and
which they must find by feeling around in the dust. It is a very
common practise on the part of the native physicians to apply
as a counter-irritant to the surface of the body a material
which burns like a red-hot iron; and if you have burned your
finger recently, you can imagine how it would be to be burned in
stripes from the nape of your neck right down to your heels, or
to have patterns worked on your body with that fiery material.
If you have suffered recently from such a simple ailment as a
toothache, imagine a land without any dentists or other means to
relieve that ache. The tooth must ache in India, until nature
brings its own remedy, and the tooth drops out.--A. S.
WILSON, “Student Volunteer Movement,” 1906.
(1578)
=Indian, The=--See CONSERVATION.
=Indian, The Word of an=--See PROMISE, AN INDIAN’S.