CHAPTER IV._The Yangtze Valley and beyond

THE HANGCHOW MEDICAL MISSION HOSPITALS

The hospitals, and the dispensaries attached to them, are too important

as a feature of Hangchow, and as an element in producing the remarkable

goodwill towards foreigners which characterises it, to be dismissed at

the tail of a chapter.

These beneficent institutions treat between them over 14,000 new

patients annually, afflicted with all manner of torments. The services

of Dr. Main and his coadjutor, Dr. Kimber, are in request among

officials, from the highest to the lowest. Mandarins of high rank,

attended by their servants, are treated in the paying wards, and

occasionally leave donations of 100 dollars in addition to their

payments. Officials of every rank in the Chekiang province send to the

British doctors for advice and medicines. Among the many marks of the

approval with which the Viceroy and other highly-placed officials regard

the medical work is their recent donation of an acre and a half of land

in an excellent position for the site of a branch hospital. It is no

disparagement to the work of Bishop Moule, who was absent during my

visit, and the other British and American clerical missionaries, to

express the opinion that the tact, _bonhomie_, and devotion of Dr. Main

during the last eighteen years, are one cause of the friendliness to

foreigners, the Chinese being as accessible to the influence of

personality as other people are.

The men’s and women’s hospitals, of which the illustration only shows

portions, are of the latest and most approved European type. They are

abreast of our best hospitals in lighting, ventilation, general

sanitation, arrangement and organisation, and the facility of obtaining

the celebrated Ningpo varnish, really a lacquer, which slowly sets with

a very hard surface, reflecting much light and bearing a weekly rub with

kerosene oil, greatly aids the sanitation. The purity of walls, floors,

and bedding is so great as to make one long for a speck of comfortable

dirt!

[Illustration: C.M.S. MISSION HOSPITAL, HANGCHOW.]

The men’s hospital buildings consist of four roomy and handsome general

wards, eleven private paying wards, holding from one to three each, a

range of rooms for the ward assistants, who are practically male nurses,

students’ rooms, rooms for the three qualified assistants, a

lecture-room with an anatomical [in lieu of the unattainable human]

subject which cost a thousand dollars, a reception-room for mandarins

with appropriate Chinese furniture, Dr. Main’s private room and medical

library, a fine consulting-room and operating theatre, bathrooms, a room

for patients’ clothing done up in numbered bundles after it has been

washed, wardrobes for the clothing which is lent to them while in

hospital, a cashier’s office, a large bottle-room, extensive storage,

and an office for out-patients.

On the street side and connected with the hospitals is a fine lofty room

where any non-patient passers-by, who are either tired or curious, can

rest and smoke, amusing themselves meantime with the transactions of the

other half of the hall, a large and attractive “drug store,” fitted up

in conventional English style, where not only medicines, but medical

requisites of all kinds can be procured both by non-patients and

foreigners. It has been remarked by Consuls Carles and Clement Allen in

their official reports, that missionaries unconsciously help British

trade by introducing articles for their own use, which commend

themselves to the Chinese; and this drug store has created a demand for

such British manufactures as condensed milk, meat extracts, rubber

tubing, soap, and the like, condensed milk having “caught on” so firmly

that several of the Chinese shops are now keeping it on sale.

This rest room is also a street-chapel for preaching and discussion, and

an office for inquiries of all kinds. There is also a large and handsome

waiting-room for out-patients, decorated with scripture pictures, in

which patriarchs and apostles appear in queues and Chinese dress, and an

opium refuge—a mournful building full of bodily torment and mental

depression. In the opinion of the doctor, “the cure” is seldom other

than temporary, and could only be effected by building up the system for

six months after leaving the refuge by tonics and nutritious diet.

Besides these buildings there are large kitchens, storehouses, and a

carpenter’s shop.

The women’s hospital, the great central ward of which, with its

highly-varnished floor, flowers, pictures, tables, chairs, and

harmonium, looks like a pleasant double drawing-room in a large English

mansion, is specially under Mrs. Main’s charge, and has head and junior

nurses and a dispenser trained by herself. It is equally efficient and

admirable.

Besides the hospital staff of twenty-six persons, there are three native

catechists who, along with Dr. Main, give Christian instruction in the

hospital to those who are willing to receive it, one of them looking

after patients in their homes, who, having become interested in

Christianity, have returned to their villages within a radius of one

hundred and fifty miles. Recently a patient, who had been for some weeks

in the hospital, recounted what he had there heard of Christianity with

such effect that over forty of his fellow-villagers, after some months,

gave up their heathen practices and became Christians; and this after he

had been beaten for his new beliefs on first going home.

The hospital is also an efficient medical school, where the usual

medical and surgical courses are given, along with clinical instruction,

during a period of five years. This school has helped largely to win the

favour of the mandarins, who have learned to appreciate Western surgery

from the cures at the hospital. Some of these students, after

graduation, have taken good positions in Shanghai and elsewhere. A few

in going into practice in the province have somewhat dropped European

medicine, and have resorted to Chinese drugs and the method of using

them, but all adhere to Western surgery, the results of which in Chinese

eyes are little short of miraculous, but possibly their mode of carrying

out antiseptic treatment would hardly come up to Lord Lister’s standard!

It is frequently believed by Chinese patients that the object of this

treatment is to prevent devils from gaining entrance to the body by

means of surgical wounds!

Dr. Lu, a refined and cultured man, Dr. Main’s senior qualified

assistant, a graduate of the hospital school, would anywhere be a

remarkable man in his profession, first as a brilliant operative

surgeon, and then for insight and accurate diagnosis. He has won the

confidence of the resident foreigners. He is a skilful medical

photographer, and his microscopic and physiological drawings are very

beautiful and show great technical skill.

The clock tower is a decorative feature of the building, and everything

within moves with clockwork regularity. The hospital is in a high state

of efficiency and spick-and-spanness, such as I have seldom seen

equalled abroad, and never exceeded.[11] Such work, done with skill,

love, and cheeriness, has an earthly reward, and Dr. Main is on most

friendly terms with the leading mandarins, who have it in their power to

help or hinder greatly. The hospital blazes with their red and gold

votive tablets, and I doubt if they would refuse him anything which he

thought it wise to ask. Almost the latest additions to a work which is

always growing are convalescent homes in the finest position outside the

city, on the breezy hill above the Si Hu [Western Lake].

I have heard some grumbling at home at the expense at which this

hospital is carried on, but perfection is not to be attained without

outlay, and in my opinion the Hangchow hospital is a good investment. It

is most desirable that Western methods of healing should be exhibited in

their best aspects in the capital of this important province, and also

that the medical school should be as well-equipped as is possible. The

benefit of this and similar schools is incalculable. The linked systems

of superstition and torture, which enter largely into Chinese medical

treatment, are undermined, and rational Western surgery is demanded by

the people. European treatment also assails the degrading belief in

sorcery and demonism in its last resort—the sick-bed—showing processes

of cure which work marvels of healing, altogether apart from witchcraft

and incantations.

Of the Medical Mission Hospital as a Christian agency I need scarcely

write, as its name is significant of its work. I believe in medical

missions, because they are the nearest approach now possible to the

method pursued by the Founder of the Christian faith, and to the

fulfilment of His command, “Heal and preach.” It is not, as some

suppose, that the medical missionary takes advantage of men in their

pain and distress to “poke at them” the claims of a foreign religion,

though if he be an honest Christian he recognises that the soul needs

enlightenment as much as the body needs healing. I have never seen a

medical mission among the forty-seven that I have visited in which

Christianity was “poked” at unwilling listeners, or in which, in the

rare cases of men declining to hear of it in the dispensary

waiting-room, it was in the very smallest degree to their disadvantage

as patients.

A fee of twenty-four _cash_ is charged for admission to the dispensary

to foster a spirit of independence, and the charge in the paying wards

is from two to ten dollars per month. Crowds of out-patients marshalled

like an army, carefully trained assistants knowing and doing their duty,

catechists, ward assistants, cashiers, photographers, cooks, gardeners,

artisans, make up the crowd which in all the morning hours swarms over

the staircases of the hospital and round the great entrance. The

dispensary patients present a sorry spectacle, owing to the prevalence

of skin diseases, superficial sores, and cavernous abscesses, from which

the plasters with which the Chinese doctors had hermetically sealed them

have been removed. Young and old, maimed, deaf, blind, loathsomely

disfigured persons, meet together, and there are often cases of gunshot

wounds, elephantiasis, and leprosy in the throng.

But, wretched as the patients are, they are capable of being amused by

Dr. Main’s jokes, and on one occasion when I was photographing four

soldiers of the Viceroy’s guard in the hospital grounds the hilarity

burst all bounds, and the distempered mass yelled with enjoyment. When I

photographed the backs of the soldiers they shouted, “She pictures their

backs because they ran away from the _wojen_” (dwarfs); and when Dr.

Main displayed their brawny legs, they nearly danced with the fun of it,

yelling, “Those are the legs they ran away on.” Not that the Viceroy’s

guard had encountered the Japanese, but these people were near enough to

Shanghai to have heard of the figure the Chinese troops had cut. A

Chinese loves a joke, and, as I have often experienced, if he can only

be made to laugh his hostility vanishes.

One of these men, picturesquely uniformed in blue and crimson, was

brought back an hour later at the point of death from opium, having

attempted his life, not because he had been laughed at, but because of a

tiff with his superior officer.

As is well known, suicide is appallingly common in China; and in the

great cities of Swatow, Mukden, and Hangchow, as a guest at medical

mission houses, I have come much into contact with its various methods.

In Mukden a frequent mode of taking life, specially among young wives,

is biting off the heads of lucifer matches, though the death from

phosphorus poisoning is known to be an agonising one. Swallowing gold

leaf or chloride of magnesium, jumping down wells or into rapid rivers,

taking lead, cutting the throat, and stabbing the abdomen have been

popular modes of self-destruction. But these are rapidly giving place to

suicide by opium owing to the facility with which it can be obtained,

the easy death which results from it, and the certainty of its operation

in the absence of the foreign doctor, his emetic, and his stomach-pump.

Medical mission hospitals in China save the lives of hundreds of

would-be suicides every year.

So far as I have been able to ascertain, the causes of suicide in China

are, not as in Europe, profound melancholia, heavy losses, or

disappointment in love, but chiefly revenge and the desire to inflict

serious injury on another. Suicide enables a Chinese to take a truly

terrible revenge, for he believes that his spirit will malignantly haunt

and injure the living; and the desire to save a suicide’s life arises in

most cases not from humanity, but from the hope of averting such a

direful catastrophe. If a master offends his servant or makes him “lose

face,” or a shopkeeper his assistant or apprentice, the surest revenge

is to die on his premises, for it not only involves the power of

haunting and of inflicting daily injuries, but renders it necessary that

the body should lie where death occurs until an official inquiry is

made, which brings into the house the scandal and turmoil of a visit

from a mandarin with a body of officials and retainers. It is quite

common for a man or woman to walk into the courtyard of a person against

whom he or she has a grudge, and take a fatal dose of opium there to

ensure these desirable results!

Among common incentives to suicide are the gusts of blind rage to which

the Chinese of both sexes are subject, the cruelty of mothers-in-law,

quarrels between husband and wife, failure to meet payments at the New

Year, gambling losses, the desire to annoy a husband, the gambling or

extravagant opium smoking of a husband, imputation of theft, having

pawned the clothes of another and being unable to redeem them, being

defrauded of money, childlessness, dread of divorce, being sold by a

husband, abridgment of liberty, poverty, and the like. Opium, from the

painless death it brings, is now resorted to on the most trivial

occasions, and has largely increased the number of suicides. Though the

reasons which I have given for self-destruction apply mostly to women,

yet where statistics are obtainable men are largely in the majority, and

revenge and the desire of inflicting injury are their great motives.

Of course, there are very many risks and difficulties in the treatment

of out-patients. Chinese medicines are administered bulkily, a pint or a

quart at a time, and patients do not understand our concentrated and

powerful doses. Hence dangerous and grotesque mistakes are continually

made, such as the following:—

_Patient_—“Doctor, when I took the medicine you gave me yesterday it

made me very sick; it has given me diarrhœa and a severe pain in the

stomach; my fingers and toes also feel very numb.”

_Dr. Malcolm_ (looking at the bottle)—“Why, you have already almost

finished the eight days’ medicine” (arsenic) “that I gave you yesterday.

The wonder is that you are alive at all.”

_Patient No. 2_ enters—“Where is the old boss of this shop? I want some

foreign devil medicine to cure malaria.”

_D._—“Allow me to tell you I am not a devil. You had better go home; and

when you can come and ask respectfully for medicine we will give it

you.”

_P. No. 3_ enters, holding out her hands and asking the doctor to find

out her disease by “comparing her pulses.”

_D._—“Tell me what is the matter with you.”

_P._—“My bones and muscles are sore all over.”

_D._—“What was the cause of your trouble?”

_P._—“It was brought on by a fit of anger.”

_D._—“How long have you had it?”

_P._—“From the time the heavens were opened, and the earth was split”

(_i.e._ a very long time).

The arms and shoulders of this woman were covered with pieces of green

plaster, given her by the Chinese doctors. She proposed to throw these

away and “to publish the doctor’s name abroad” if he cured her. So she

received medicine with very full directions about taking it; these were

not enough. She asked a string of questions such as if she must heat it

before taking it, if she must keep the bottle tightly corked, if she

must take it along with anything else, and lastly—

_P._—“Shall I abstain from eating anything?”

_D._—“No.”

_P._ (greatly disappointed).—“What! shall I not forbid my mouth anything

at all?”

_D._ (jokingly).—“Yes. Do not talk too much; do not revile your

neighbours; do not smoke opium; do not scatter lies.”

The doctor getting worried, reiterates plain directions regarding the

medicine, tells her they are very busy, and that she must not ask any