Patients discharged as cured often return. "Tell me again that Name that I can say when I pray," one of them asked, to explain the reappearance of her shrivelled old face; "I forget so soon." And she went on her way repeating the Name that even some of the heathen realise must be exalted above all others.
"I know that your Jesus must reign over our land," a Punjabi woman said to a lady who had opened a dispensary at Tarn Taran, a sacred city of the Sikhs; "I know it, because your religion is full of love and ours has none at all."
The mission hospital at this city, with the name which literally means "The Place of Salvation," and the dispensary seen in the illustration, came mainly into being through the determination of the inhabitants. A suffering baby might claim a share in its existence. This infant's mother brought it to a missionary whose training as a nurse had made her a friend in sickness. The child's sight was hopelessly gone. The mother said that the hakim had told her alum was good for sore eyes, so she had put it under the lids.
"You have used it in such a way as to blind your baby," the missionary said; "and I could have told you what to do."
"How should I know?" the woman replied, using a common phrase to express helplessness or lethargy; but she told the story to her friends, and other mothers, whose babies' eyes were suffering, soon proved that the white woman had made no empty boast. Ophthalmia is terribly common in India, and its marvellous cures began to be famous.
One day a family party carried an invalid into the verandah of the Tarn Taran mission house. The missionary looked inside the doolie; she was not a doctor, and declined to undertake such a serious case, and told the men to take their invalid to the Amritsar Hospital. They were determined to take no such trouble. To show that she was equally determined to make them, she went inside the house and shut the doors and blinds. Who would hold out the longest? The result was a foregone conclusion. The Punjabis, armed with a greater disregard for a woman's life, gained the victory by the simple method of beating a retreat, leaving the helpless woman behind them. In common humanity she could not be left to die. In a few days her family returned to inquire, and were gratified to find her progressing towards recovery. The white woman's celebrity was now secured, and to her consternation and embarrassment she found her verandah full of patients, and, from overwork, was soon herself added to the number. The people of Tarn Taran afterwards gave the building for a Women's Mission Hospital, and a new one is now in the charge of a fully qualified lady doctor.
Hospitals are by far the most satisfactory part of medical missions. In zenanas and dispensaries it is one thing to prescribe and give advice, and another for orders to be obeyed, especially if they are contrary to rules of caste or custom. It is well known that a Hindu soldier, who will follow his British officer into the fiercest mêlée, and, if necessary, die for him, if true to his own creed, will not receive a cup of water at his hands. When wounded his parched lips will close tightly, lest his caste should suffer. The same principle debars his womenfolk from accepting physic in a liquid form from Englishwomen. They may, however, take powders. Written directions are generally useless, and verbal ones often misunderstood. It is little wonder if dispensary patients make slow progress.
"Are you sure you took the medicine I gave you?" inquired a medical missionary of one who made no advance at all.
"Quite sure, Miss Sahiba."
"How did you take it?"