"I ate the paper and threw away the dust."
This mistake was not astonishing under the circumstances. One Mohammedan specific is to swallow a paper pellet with the name of God written in Arabic; another, for the mullah to write an Arabic inscription on a plate, and for the water that washes it off to be the dose.
A GROUP OF WORKERS AT THE DUCHESS OF CONNAUGHT'S HOSPITAL.
(Dr. Wheeler stands at the left-hand side of group.)
It is well when superstition and misconception stop short at swallowing paper and inky water. A woman, seriously injured from an accident, was carried into the Duchess of Connaught Hospital, Peshawur. Her husband accompanied her, and saw the medical missionary in charge carefully attend to fractures and bruises. Rest and sleep and quiet were doing their work, and the man was left to watch. A sudden crash startled the ward. The husband had turned the bedstead over on its side, and flung his wife down. He fancied she was dying, and said it would imperil her soul if it departed whilst she lay on anything but the floor. He had the satisfaction of knowing that she died where he placed her. This was a case of a Hindu "sinning religiously." It would be harder to forgive the frequent sacrifice of life to superstition, if there were no ennobling element underlying it of honest desire for some vague spiritual good.
The Duchess of Connaught Hospital is a permanent memorial of her Royal Highness's kind interest in the women of India. Whilst on the North-Western Frontier she went through the Dispensary and Nursing Home which represented the first effort to bring medical aid to the Afghan women, and allowed it to be called after her name. A new and much larger building, of which a drawing has been reproduced, has taken the place of the native quarters, where Mohammedan bigotry was by slow degrees overcome. For years the ladies of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, who had charge of this hospital, were the only Europeans living within the walls of Peshawur. Every night the great city gates closed them in, and separated them from other missionaries and from Government servants. They chose to be in the midst of their work, and though outbreaks of Mohammedan fanaticism repeatedly checked teaching in schools and zenanas, ministry to the sick continued, and never lost the friendly confidence of Peshawuris.
(Photo supplied by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society.)
STAFF AND PATIENTS OF ST. CATHERINE'S HOSPITAL, AMRITSAR.