In the large ward Seniors, equipped with head mirrors and stethoscopes, with chart and pen, are taking down patients' histories and suggesting diagnoses. Soon it will be their work to do this unaided, and every bit of supervised practice is laying up stores of experience for the future.
On the next verandah Doctor Findlay is giving a lecture and demonstration on the care and feeding of babies. Demonstration is not difficult, for the hospital always provides an abundance of ailing infants whose regulated diet and consequently improving health serve as laboratory tests.
The Ford in a New Capacity.
Now we follow the shady verandah around three sides of the attractive courtyard with its trees and flowering creepers. At the far end the class in obstetrics is going on. And behold, the irrepressible Ford has entered into a new province. This truly American product will probably be found to-day in every continent and nearly every country in the world, but one ventures to prophesy that Vellore is the only spot on the habitable globe where its cast-off tires have been metamorphosed into models of human organs! Every student not working over an actual mother or baby is busy performing on these home-made rubber models the operations she may some day be called to do upon a living patient.
In the midst of these Dr. Griscom is interrupted by next ward that didn't cry for a week? You know that this morning you slapped it and it cried for the first time, and its mother was very happy. Now she wants to hear it cry again, and says—"may she please beat it herself?" The Doctor leaves her Ford tires, and runs to the ward to explain to the overzealous mother the difference between massage administered by a physician and the ordinary manner of "beating" a baby.
[Illustration: Interior of the Temple Where God is a Stone Image]
[Illustration: Interior of the Hospital Where God is Love]
Our next place of pilgrimage is the "town site" where the new Nurses' Home affords temporary dormitory accommodation. Beside it is the Doctor's bungalow, and in the open space next is to be built the big dispensary. This is well called the "town site," for it is in the thick of Vellore's population. Children, dogs, and donkeys swarm across its precincts, and there is no fear of these students being separated from the actualities of Indian life. The two-story buildings, however, give abundant opportunity for the occupants to "lift up their eyes unto the hills"; and the open air sleeping-rooms promise breezes in the hottest nights.
"Mrs. Earth Thou-Art."
Here, too, the Seniors have their lectures in obstetrics, and with the beginning of that course a new difficulty arose. Equipment here, as in practically every Mission institution, is pitifully limited by lack of funds. For the proper teaching of obstetrics there is need of a pelvic manikin, lifesize. There were no funds to spare for so expensive a piece of apparatus, and, if there had been, there would have been a delay of months in getting it out from England or America. But meantime obstetrics must be taught, and a manikin must be had. "Necessity is the mother of invention." Necessity got to work, and "Mrs. Earth-Thou-Art" is the result. Dr. Griscom sent for the potter, who left his wheel in the bazaar and came to this market for new wares. After long and detailed instructions, he returned to his wheel, and set it to the making of a shape never seen in the potter's vision of Jeremiah or Robert Browning. The first attempt was a failure; the second and third were equally useless; at last something was produced that approximated the human size and form. The tires of the Ford were again requisitioned and, by the miraculous aid of the blacksmith, nailed to the pottery figure without wrecking the latter. "Mrs. Earth-Thou-Art" at last reposed complete, one example of the triumph of the missionary teacher over the handicaps of the situation. We hope that her brittle clay will survive until such time as some friend from across the sea is moved to provide for her a "store-made" successor.