(Photo: Baness Bros.)
WAITING THEIR TURN.
(Patients outside the Tarn Taran Hospital Dispensary.)
Happily, all the women in India are not secluded in zenanas. By far the largest proportion live in the villages, but their notions of propriety are very strict. The hard-working field-women will hide themselves on the suspicion of a sahib being within reach. When once they are satisfied that the visitor belongs to their own sex and is harmless, crowds beset the missionary encampments. Many tales of suffering are poured into sympathising ears.
"I am blind from crying for my only son" is not an infrequent complaint. Nothing can be done in this case.
"There is no god or goddess to love a Hindu woman. Whatever offerings we make her, the goddess of small-pox smites us, and then the men say the women have not offered enough, and are angry." This was the reply of a Punjabi woman, who spoke for her friends and neighbours.
One Bengali woman told a missionary of the death of a precious baby boy. There did not seem much the matter, but the hakim (a native quack) first gave him something burning to swallow, and then applied a red-hot iron to each side in turn; and the child only drew one or two breaths after this treatment. This also, one hopes, was kindly meant. The Hindus are by no means wanting in humanity, but ignorance is often as fatal as cruelty.
Many patients find an excuse for coming again and again to the dispensaries. There they hear of blessings in this world and the next which they say seem too good to be true. They see love shining in the earnest faces, and feel it in the touch of hands that will not shrink from dressing repulsive sores.
The majority of cases in dispensaries are ordinary fevers or skin diseases resulting from dirt, and other scourges that follow defiance of elementary rules of health.