Back of the dispensary is the milk room, where in an adapted and Indianized apparatus, due to the doctor's ingenuity, the milk supply is pasteurized each day, and given out only to babies whose mothers are positively unable to nurse them, and are too poor to buy.
Of some of the difficulties encountered Dr. Vera Singhe will tell in her own words:
"The work of the midwife is carried out in the filthiest parts of the city among the lowest of the city's population, both day and night, in sun and rain … A patient whose 'address' was registered at the Triplicane Centre was searched for by a nurse on duty in the locality of the 'address' given, and could not be found. Much disappointed, the nurse was returning to the centre, when to her bewilderment she found that her patient had been delivered in a broken cart."
Of some of the actual cases where mothers have been attended by untrained barber women, the details are too revolting to publish. Imagine the worst you can, and then be sure that your imagination has altogether missed the mark.
Of the reaction upon ignorance and superstition Dr. Vera Singhe says, "In Triplicane dispensary as many as sixty cords around waists and arms and variously shaped and sized pieces of leather which had been tied in much trust and confidence to an innocent sufferer with the hope of obtaining recovery have been in a single day removed by the mothers themselves on seeing that our treatment was more effective than the talisman."
Weighing, feeding, bathing, prevention of disease, simple remedies—knowledge of all these goes out from the health centres to the unsanitary homes of crowded city streets. So far one woman's influence penetrates.
In a Hospital.
It was on a train journey up-country from Madras, some twelve years ago, that I first met Dr. Paru. She and I shared the long seat of the small second-class compartment, and in that close neighborliness I soon fell to wondering. From her dress I knew her to be a Hindu, yet her jewels were few and inconspicuous. She was most evidently of good family, yet she was traveling unattended.
Presently we fell into some casual talk, the inconsequent remarks common to chance acquaintance the world over. More intimate conversation followed, and before the end of the short journey together, I knew who Miss Paru was. The oldest daughter of a liberal Hindu lawyer on the Malabar Coast, she was performing the astounding feat of taking a medical course at the Men's Government College in Madras, while systematically breaking her caste by living at the Y.W.C.A. I almost gasped with astonishment. "But what do your relatives say?" I asked. "Oh," she replied, "my father is the head of his family and an influential man in our town. He does as he pleases and no one dares to object."
That was twelve years ago. Yesterday for the second time I met my traveling companion of long ago. She is now Dr. Paru, assistant to Dr. Kugler in the big Guntur Women's Hospital, with its hundred beds, managing alone its daily dispensary list of one hundred and fifty patients, and performing unaided such difficult major operations as a Caesarean section for a Brahman woman, of whom Dr. Kugler says, "The patient had made many visits to Hindu shrines, but the desire of her life, her child, was the result of an operation in a Mission Hospital. In our Hospital her living child was placed in her arms as a result of an operation performed by a Christian doctor."