MEDICAL MISSIONS
After literature perhaps we should place medical missions as one of the
most effective ways of placing before the Chinese the difference
between our civilisations and of showing them the truth and beauty of
Christianity. There are three or possibly four reasons why medical
missions are a right and effective way of conducting the Christian
propaganda. First, they are an object-lesson of the love which
Christianity inculcates. In school teaching we find that the
object-lesson is the most efficient and easiest way of getting the
human mind to understand a quite new idea; medical missions are
object-lessons of the essential character of Christian teaching.
Chinese ethics are very distinct in limiting the duty of man to certain
well-known relations. They are five in number: the relation of the
sovereign and minister, of the husband and wife, of the father and son,
of the elder and younger brother, and of friends. No Confucian
recognises the universal brotherhood of man; that is solely a Christian
doctrine. Thus Confucius reproves the man who wishes to offer
sacrifices to some one else's forefathers; that appears to him to be as
officious as the duty of {221} offering sacrifices to his own ancestors
is important; a man has no obligations to any one else but to those who
stand to him in one of these five relations. Very different is the
tone of the Apocrypha, which is not of very different date, and which
puts burial of the dead among one of the first duties of man without
specifying the necessity of any close relationship.
The action of missionaries in coming to China was therefore wholly
misunderstood by the Chinese. They were regarded as merely the
emissaries of foreign powers, sent to spy out the land. Considering
the way in which the Roman Catholic missions did as a fact identify
themselves with the foreign policy of France, one cannot altogether
wonder that the Chinese attributed to their mission the selfish
principles they themselves would have followed. The first purpose,
therefore, served by medical missions is to demonstrate to the Chinese
that Christianity has higher ideals than Confucianism.
Their second great object is one that must appeal to the heart of
everybody who has been in China. It is impossible to work among the
Chinese without being rendered miserable by the appalling amount of
suffering and misery that exists at the present day. The poverty of
England cannot be spoken of in the same breath nor can in any way be
compared with the poverty of China. Deplorable as is the condition of
many individuals in England, harsh as is the action of some of our
casual wards, {222} any one who has studied both will freely allow that
the poor in England are rich compared to the poor in China. Among the
vast crowd that wanders along the North Road to London, you will
scarcely see one without boots; there is scarcely one who does not get
a piece of bread to eat when he is hungry; there are none who are
suffering from untended wounds or unalleviated sickness. The workhouse
infirmary will always open its doors, however harsh the Guardians, to
those who are absolutely ill. But in China, starvation is quite
common. Missionaries tell you how at certain junctures they have
travelled along a road, passing man after man lying at the point of
death, and those who are sick have too often no resource but to wait
with patience the pain and death they foresee as their fate. The
missionary feels, as he preaches the doctrine of love, that he cannot
consistently ignore these suffering multitudes.
The third reason why medical missions are maintained is because they
are a means of approaching people who otherwise would not hear the
Christian truth. The man who has successfully healed the body has some
reasonable hope to expect that the patient will accept that medicine
that he offers to cure the soul. So medical missions have been started
in every place. We visited many excellent medical missions, from
chilly Mukden to torrid Canton. There are many stories told how in the
days when the Chinese would not listen to {223} missionaries, the
medical missionary obtained that hearing which was refused to his
clerical brothers. I was told one medical missionary found that the
moment that he was extracting teeth was the moment when he could best
advance his teaching. I have never heard the story substantiated;
unless the Chinese are very different from us, one would have thought
that the teaching would have had a distinctly painful association.
Perhaps he took as his thesis the extraction of sin from the character.
His success was equalled by that non-medical missionary who had the
advantage of having a set of false teeth; these he used to take out
before the astonished coolies and replace them; then having attracted
their attention by this manoeuvre, he took up his parable on the need
for taking away their sins from them and for putting new life into them.
The Chinese coolie loves a jest, and once he is on the laugh he will,
unlike his English brother, be much more inclined to attend to serious
teaching. One of the missionaries who understands this trait of the
Chinese best is Dr. Duncan Main of Hangchow, where we spent two most
interesting days seeing his hospitals and work and visiting his
patients.
There is no better testimony to his great work than his obvious
popularity. Wherever he goes there are smiles and greetings. He
explains as we walk who are the individuals who salute him. That great
fat man who stands bowing and smiling is a {224} merchant of some
wealth; his wife has been in the hospital; she has been tended by Dr.
Main and by his skill has been cured. That old woman who stands by him
smiling is another ex-patient. That young man with an intellectual
face and a dark robe is an old medical student, now a doctor himself
with a large practice, and he has settled near Dr. Main's hospital.
And so his work increases and grows and the good he does must live
after him. He takes us into the out-patients' room; they are a motley
crowd, with strappings and bandages on various parts of their persons.
While they are sitting there a lay-reader expounds to them the elements
of Christian teaching. What a contrast to their minds must be the
plain forcible teaching and the simple effective remedies and medicines
of the Christians to the incantations and nauseous compounds of their
native doctors. There is a great doubt as to what is the nature of
many of the Chinese drugs. They always prescribe a vast number, many
of which are apparently innocuous in their effect; they always give
them in large quantities, and do not in any way attempt to isolate and
extract the active properties of the things they use. You see a man
eating a large bowl of some nauseous compound and you are told he is
taking Chinese medicine. You ask a captain what his cargo consists of,
and he tells you that it is largely made up of Chinese medicine. Some
of the medicine seems to be prescribed on the principle of our old
herbals; that is, there is a fancied resemblance between the plant and
the disease. Others seem to {225} come from well-known remedies
administered in various ways; ground-up deer's horns from the mountains
of Siberia has probably much the same effect as chalk has in our
pharmacopoeia. But there also seems to be some possibility that the
Chinese doctors have certain useful remedies which are unknown to
Western medicine.
There is a strange story told in Shanghai about a certain remedy for a
horrible disease called "sprue." The story is well known to every
resident in Shanghai, still it will bear repetition. A certain quack
called "French Peter"--I do not know his proper name--habitually cured
sprue. Cases which English doctors had absolutely failed to cure, and
which threatened ruining a career or loss of life, he cured in a few
weeks. He had two remedies--a white powder and a black draught. He
himself was a most unattractive-looking man. My informant told me that
his career was being threatened by this horrible disease, and that he
was expecting to leave China in a week or two, when some one suggested
that he should try "French Peter." When they met, "French Peter's"
appearance was so unprepossessing that the sick man's courage nearly
failed him. He had been for weeks on a milk diet, and the first thing
that the man said to him was, "Look here, take these medicines and go
and have a good beefsteak for luncheon." He decided to try them. He
ate his beefsteak, he took the white powder and the black draught, and
I think within three weeks was quite well. "French Peter" would {226}
never tell his secret or where he got his remedies; at least he used to
give different accounts to different people. I believe he is now dead,
but on talking the matter over with some Chinese friends they assured
me that the remedies were well known to Chinese doctors, and that
"French Peter" had got them from one of their compatriots.
Dr. Main deals with his patients in the same cheery way that he
addresses every one; a word or two suffices to discover the nature of
their ailment. If the case is very serious, the patient is detained
for further examination; if it is trivial, it is attended to at once by
a native dresser. For the rest he himself prescribes.
Then he takes us up to the wards, and explains that the great
difficulty is to get the Chinese to care for cleanliness. That is the
same story in every hospital; they cannot believe it matters very much
whether the thing is kept clean or not. The medical students will
proceed to handle anything after they have washed their hands and think
that the previous washing insures asepticism, regardless of the fact
that they have touched many septic things.
Dr. Main's hospital is typical of mission hospitals--Dr. Christie's
hospital at Mukden, Dr. Gillison's at Hankow, Dr. Cochrane's at Peking,
and many others. There are also hospitals for women. We saw many; the
first we visited, the Presbyterian Hospital at Canton, was a good
example, impressing us not only by its efficiency, but also by the
great service it performed to the suffering {227} masses of China by
training women doctors, who are permitted to minister to their sisters
when etiquette does not permit of male medical attendance. The lady
who showed us round the hospital spoke English fluently; she was
dressed in the dress of the Cantonese woman, which suited her
profession admirably, as it consisted of a long black coat and
trousers. Some hospitals are reserved for the very poor; at Nanking,
for instance, Dr. Macklin showed us over his beggar hospital. He
follows the parable of the Good Samaritan most literally, and wherever
he finds a poor, starving, dying man, he brings him in. Clearly he
cannot afford anything but a limited accommodation for these poor
creatures, but he is on the whole most successful, and there is many a
man whom poverty had brought near to death whose life he has saved. As
one looked at those types of suffering humanity and realised the good
that Dr. Macklin was doing, one felt that the days of saintly service
were not over yet.
Another beautiful work is Dr. Main's leper hospital at Hangchow. It
was a weird and strange experience to hear those lepers singing our old
English hymns. Leprosy, as my readers doubtless know, does not often
leave open sores; it slowly eats away the body while it leaves the skin
intact; and so you see men without hands and arms yet with finger nails
upon the stump, blind men without noses, and very commonly men whose
voices are cracked and broken. These lepers are housed in an old
temple, in one of the most beautiful situations in China--a {228}
situation which is supposed to be the original of the landscape on the
old willow pattern plates; and the beauty of their surroundings
contrasts strangely with their hideous forms and harsh voices. There
was an infinite pathos when by that blue lake and purple mountain,
those harsh but plaintive voices sang the old tune of "Jesu, lover of
my soul"; and though we could not follow the Chinese words, the faces
of these poor sufferers were eloquent in expressing how fully they felt
the meaning of that hymn.
But above all we should mention the great work that is being carried on
by Dr. Cochrane at Peking. He has managed to induce all the medical
missions in Peking to unite in founding a great hospital--a hospital
which has received the approval of Government. This successful example
of federation has solved a difficult problem. No doubt the efficiency
of medical missions in many a town is impeded by their want of unity.
A mission body will open a medical mission, and will send out a doctor
or even two in charge; one doctor must go on his furlough, another is
perhaps ill, and the result is that the mission is closed. The
commercial community are rather ready to point out that the mission
hospital is closed in the summer when there is the greatest need for
it. The answer to the taunt is the policy of federation. While it is
next to impossible to keep open the mission hospitals in an unhealthy
climate with a limited staff, it is perfectly possible to do it if the
staff is increased. Every doctor in Central and Southern China must
{229} have a certain period of rest, otherwise he will not be able to
stand the enervating effects of a semi-tropical climate; and however
possible it is to keep white men at work for three or four years
without a holiday, and I know commercial people claim that this has
been done in certain individual instances, it is in reality the very
poorest economy. The mission doctor is far too valuable a person to
have his life cast away by such a foolish policy of extravagance. He
must have his rest every year and his furlough every seven years. But
it is not necessary that the hospitals should be closed if the staff is
big enough; a certain number of the hospital staff can go on leave, and
when they are rested, can come back and allow others to go in their
turn. Dr. Cochrane has shown at Peking that such federation is
possible, and the China Emergency Committee is making every effort to
encourage a similar federation in other parts of China. Medical
missions are splendid examples of Christian charity and love, but they
are rather sad examples of the lack of unity among Christian men.
Analogous to the medical mission are the missions to the blind and the
deaf. The blind are a striking example of how Christianity alleviates
misery, for the blind in China learn to read more quickly than those
who have sight. The teachers of the blind have invented a system of
raised type by which the Chinaman can read every word that is
pronounced in Chinese. It is not our letter system, which they {230}
would find difficult to understand, but something after the nature of
the Japanese system. Each syllable is represented by a sign; so,
strange as it may appear, the blind man not having to study the
character learns to read more quickly than the man with normal sight.
There is an excellent school for the blind at Peking, under Dr.
Murray's superintendence. There is another at Hankow, where we saw a
most striking instance of the beauty of holiness. One of the masters
at this blind school was a blind man himself; he was a most ardent
Christian; he had been taught to play the organ, which, indeed, is a
speciality at that school, many of the organists in the mission
churches in Hankow coming from it, and one could not look upon his face
without feeling a conviction that his spiritual vision was as clear as
his physical sight was dark.
There is a fourth reason, and one which applies as much to educational
missions as to medical missions, why both are fitting and proper ways
to teach Christianity. Christianity claims to and does benefit the
whole of man, not merely his spiritual side. Mankind cannot properly
be cut up and divided into spirit, mind, and body. He is essentially
one, and it is most necessary that those who are learning about our
religion, should understand that while we claim every benefit should
come from the spiritual part of our nature, we are prepared to show
that we in no wise despise the body, which needs religious care as much
as the soul. Neither are we careless about the {231} mind. So the
three parts of mission work go hand in hand, for preaching and prayer
will heal the ills of the soul, the medical mission deals with the ills
of the body, and the educational mission makes the mind healthy and
strong. We shall deal with the educational side of mission work later
on.
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