SICK CHILDREN
Measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, chickenpox, Persian
children have them all. Typhoid fever, diphtheria, rheumatic fever are
all common. But almost the commonest illness of all is smallpox.
A woman brought a child into the dispensary waiting-room one day
covered with a smallpox rash. The doctor, new to the country, ordered
her out, condemning her reckless disregard for infection. “Is there
anyone who has not had smallpox?” she asked, looking round at the
thirty or forty other people in the room. As she expected, all had had
it, and she came in.
It is considered a children’s illness, because people hardly ever grow
up without having had it. In fact, their parents take care they shall
not, for they are so afraid they will take it badly at an awkward time
that they choose a convenient time, and either put the child with a
person who has smallpox mildly, or, oftener, inoculate him with it,
just as we inoculate our babies with vaccine.
My cook asked me one day, with tears, to go and see his baby; they
had given it smallpox to get it over, and it had taken it badly. I am
glad to say it recovered. He had not thought it necessary to make any
difference in his cooking for us, while he was spending his nights with
a baby with smallpox. Another missionary’s cook brought his little boy
with smallpox to the kitchen because it was more cheerful for him than
being at home; he could lie and watch his father cooking.
So the Persians do not take much trouble to prevent their children from
getting ill. How do they care for them when they are ill?
First of all they start doctoring them themselves, except in smallpox,
when they say it is dangerous to give any medicine. For other illnesses
they give plenty of medicine, not in little teaspoonfuls, but in nice
big bowlfuls, and the nastier it is the more good they think it will
do. On the whole Persian children are exceedingly good about taking
their medicine, but whether they are or not they have to take it. One
way of giving it to naughty children is to pour it through their noses
from a little tin cup with a long narrow spout.
If the child gets no better the doctor is consulted; very often two
or three doctors are called in, and sometimes the parents follow the
doctor’s advice, but very often they do not. It depends partly on the
beads, and a good deal on how much they have paid. If they pay much
they generally make the patient take all the medicine for fear their
money should be wasted. If the doctor seems unable to cure the patient
a reader is called in, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, who reads
the Quran over the patient in the hope that it may effect a cure where
medical treatment has failed.
In the case of a long, tiresome illness, or when they despair of
recovery, it is not uncommon for the patient’s friends to hasten the
end by giving a dose of poison.
One girl, who had very little the matter with her, but was always
making a fuss over her ailments, gave her family a great deal of
trouble with her fancies. They found her recovery was likely to be
slow, and although she was going on well they one day told the doctor
that “they had _given her sherbet_ and she had died.”
I myself was several times asked to give poison in the form of
medicine, and I think they were rather surprised when I told them how
Christians regard such a thing.
When the medical missionary starts work he may be puzzled by the very
common request that he will give the second medicine first. It appears
that the people think, with how much truth I cannot say, that their
doctors give first a medicine to make the patient worse and then one to
make him better.
Perhaps that was what the devoted old grandmother was thinking of, who
had brought her poor little granddaughter in from a village many miles
away, very, very ill with rheumatic fever. She called in the English
doctor, and got her medicine from the dispensary, but when the doctor
called next day, she said she had not given the child any, because she
remembered she had never asked if it would do her good and so she was
afraid to try it.
It must surely have been in the minds of the friends of one patient who
came to the missionary, and said their friend was worse every time she
took her medicine, and they wanted some more, it was doing her so much
good.
When you are very ill, Mother keeps you very quiet and does not let you
see visitors, but when a little Persian is very ill all the neighbours
crowd in to see him, and the more ill he is the more people come in.
And they do not tread on tiptoe and talk in a whisper, they all talk
quite loud out and smoke _qaliāns_ and drink tea, and make noise enough
to give anyone in good health a headache, much more a sick child.
One day I was called in to see a child who was dangerously ill.
Instead of showing me into her room, the mother, together with a
variety of aunts, sisters, and other relations, escorted me to their
receiving-room. I asked for the sick child, and was told I should
see her after tea, which meant at least half an hour’s delay. As
the account they had given of her sounded very bad, I said I could
not wait, that it was not our custom to think of tea-drinking and
entertainment when our patients were perhaps dying. With great
difficulty I managed to persuade them to take me to the poor little
girl, whom they had left alone while they all came to have tea and
sweets with me. She was, as they had said, very ill, her recovery was
very doubtful, yet as soon as we left the room, and had sent for the
medicine, they were all eager to entertain me, and I do not think
anyone would have stayed with the child if I had not insisted, and they
were all as gay and lively as if they had had no one dangerously ill in
the next room.
The Persians are very hospitable and like to put their best before
a visitor, and they consider it very necessary to provide something
nice for the doctor. Some Persian doctors send word beforehand what
refreshments they would like got ready.
Sometimes this deters the very poor from calling in even the mission
doctor, who, they know, would treat them free. They cannot even provide
tea and sugar. It was a great relief to more than one poor person, when
it was discovered that the mission ladies were fond of boiled turnips,
for a plate of turnips was within the reach of the poorest, costing
only about a halfpenny. The news spread, and several sick people were
able at once to have a doctor.
But it is in surgery that one sees the Persian doctor at his worst.
Here comes little Husain with his head plastered up with mud; on
removing the mud we find a broken skull and a large wound in a foul
condition. Next comes little Sakīneh with both hands burnt; the burns
are smeared with sticky white of egg covered over with leaves; it will
take days of proper dressing to get the wounds clean. But she is not so
badly off as Rubābeh, whose burn has been dressed with camphorated oil,
and is so inflamed that she screams and cries the whole time.
A more fortunate child was the little girl who was scalded nearly all
over, but not deeply, and who looked like a little nigger with the
_ink_ they had put on. She got well very quickly. It is like Indian
ink, and seems to be the best of the remedies the Persians use for
burns.
With broken bones the Persian doctors are not very successful either.
Little Hasan, aged four, fell and broke both arms. The Persian doctor
as usual tied them up with splints that were too small to be any real
use, but he tried to make up for that by tying the bandages very tight,
and poor little Hasan had both arms partly destroyed. How proud he was
when, after some weeks at the C.M.S. hospital, he was able to carry an
English doll clasped to his heart with the two poor bandaged stumps.
There was some truth in what one doctor said, that more than half the
cases that came into the hospital had come there in consequence of the
Persian doctors’ treatment. The remedy is generally worse than the
disease.
There are exceptions, and I have met Persian doctors, who not only had
real knowledge of medical treatment, but had some of the true doctor’s
spirit of pity and self-sacrifice. Especially I would mention the
brave Persian doctor who stayed at his post in Shiraz in the cholera
epidemic of 1904, and fought that terrible disease instead of yielding
to the panic that had seized his fellow countrymen.
It is evident, however, that there is a great and crying need for
dispensaries and hospitals in Persia. So in the north the American
Presbyterians, and in the south the Church Missionary Society, have
founded them in a number of towns.
As a rule a dispensary is started first, to which out-patients can come
to get medicines and have their hurts attended to. Later a hospital is
opened. Generally the first hospital is a very poor affair, but as the
work grows money is collected, and nice, clean, convenient hospitals
are built and furnished. Armenian and Persian boys and girls are
trained as nurses and assistants, the boys for the men’s hospital, the
girls for the women’s and children’s.
Here Hasan and ‘Ali, Fātimeh and Rubābeh, and a great many other little
Persian children are made as comfortable as their illness allows, and
are kept clean and happy in comfortable beds, and well fed and cared
for.
[Illustration: A MISSION HOSPITAL]
Morning and evening they hear prayers read, and soon they too venture
to join in the “Our Father.” And every day someone reads and explains
in the ward something about the Lord Jesus Christ, and His love and His
teaching, and they learn that He knows and loves each little Akbar or
Sakīneh and wants them for His own, and they learn to love Him because
He first loved them. They learn hymns too, and love to sing them,
the same hymns that you know so well, “Whiter than snow,” “Simply
trusting,” “Here we suffer grief and pain,” and many others.
The last recalls the story of little Bāgum, the child-wife, who was
deliberately and cruelly burnt by her husband, and was brought to the
mission hospital. There was no hope of recovery, but all was done that
was possible to relieve her pain and brighten her last days.
She had heard something of the Gospel story from a missionary who had
paid a visit to her native village, and she had been so interested that
she had asked two Persian children to teach her more. When she was
brought to the hospital even the terrible pain she was suffering did
not make her forget the wonderful story, and she begged to be told more
and more. And resting in the love of Christ and trusting wholly in Him
and His salvation, she loved to sing of the joy to which He was going
to take her and kept begging for “Here we suffer grief and pain,” and
repeating over and over the refrain, “Shādī, Shādī,” (joy, joy), until
even the Muhammadan women would sit beside her and sing the hymn that
comforted her so much.
In a small village in another part of Persia lived a little lame girl.
She could not walk at all, and her leg was drawn up so that she could
not straighten it, and she suffered very much. She was a good deal
of trouble to her parents, and they got tired of taking care of her,
and neglected her a good deal, till at last her father heard of the
mission hospital in the neighbouring town, seventeen miles off, and
took her there to see if the _Ferangis_ (Europeans) could cure her.
She was taken in, washed, and dressed in clean clothes and put to
bed. At first she used to scream when her leg was touched, but it was
operated on, and gradually, very gradually, the pain grew less, and the
leg grew straighter. But still, as the months went on, the recovery
was very slow, and when the weather grew so hot that the hospital had
to be closed and her father took her home, though free from pain while
she lay still in bed, the pain was so great when she tried to stand
that she could not walk a step. But as she lay alone on her bed at home
she thought over all she had heard at the hospital, and one day a new
thought struck her. Surely the _Khānums_ had told her that the Lord
Jesus Christ, Who used to cure people so wonderfully, was alive still
and could hear when anyone spoke to Him. Why had she never asked Him
to make her leg well? And then and there, in her ignorance and simple
faith, she asked Him, Who in the old Gospel days had made the lame
to walk, to make her walk, and, confident in His love and power, she
“arose and walked.”
When the hospital was reopened she came back again still lame, still in
pain, but able to walk about with a stick. And she loved more than ever
to hear of Him who had not only done so much for the sick Jews of old
times, but had done so much too for her.