Changing China

by William Gascoyne-Cecil; Lady Florence Mary Cecil

CHAPTER XVIII

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.