ON TOP OF AN OVEN. WOMEN SIFTING WHEAT
The following data, taken from accounts of medical assistance rendered to inhabitants of a score of villages in the country about Râm Allâh for a year are suggestive of the distribution of ailments. Leaving out of the account wounds, the chief ailments were classified under fevers,[[101]] malaria and typhus, with gastric troubles nearly akin. Then comes the second group of troubles, with influenza and pneumonia. Third in frequency was rheumatism. Enteric troubles were rarely mentioned. Eye troubles are common, but the physician is not resorted to as frequently as would be supposed. A few cases of abscess, dropsy and eczema were mentioned. May and June, October and November, brought numerous cases of fevers. January and March exceeded in pulmonary affections, though they were pretty generally met with throughout the year. Autumn is a very unhealthy season. The dust blowing about the villages in the high winds is laden with abundant filth in pulverized form. Sunstroke is not unknown among the natives.[[102]] The reapers in the Ghôr are often stricken with deadly fever, probably because of the poor water supply, hot sun, cold nights and irregular meals. Contagious skin, scalp and eye diseases are to be dreaded. Because of the lack of facilities and knowledge in the care of children convalescing from measles, ḥuṣbeh, that disease is much feared, and the mortality among the young is great. The typhoid cases in the country are long and tedious, though not perhaps so violent as with us. Leben makes an ideal food for the patient.
Certain of the fountains of the country are provided with a more or less capacious catch-basin from which animals as well as people may drink. The fastidious are not to be blamed if they insist on seeing their own drinking water taken from the actual flow of the spring and under such conditions as shall not subject them to the washings of other people’s mouths. Often at such places leeches thrive in the water, and where they are known to abound the natives seldom let their animals drink if other available water be near. People, too, are often bothered by the leeches lodging in the sides of the mouth or throat. Those that are swallowed cause no inconvenience, but when tiny leeches lodge in the side of the throat and grow to an uncomfortable size they have to be extracted. One day I was lunching with the local physician, Dr. Philip Ma‛lûf, when a poor woman from el-Bîreh, not finding him at the dispensary, sought him at his home. She was troubled with a leech which had grown to uncomfortable size in her throat and was using up too much of the blood needed in her system. After the parasite was removed she haggled about the price of the operation.
At another time I saw a little girl sitting on a chair in the sun in front of the doctor’s dispensary. The doctor said that her leech was too difficult of observation and approach with his tweezers, but that in the warm sun it would be tempted within reach.
Medical assistance in the form of hospital or dispensary facilities is now offered at Hebron, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, Nâblus, Nazareth, Tiberias, Ṣafed, Haifa, es-Salṭ and Kerak. To these places the peasantry come from the country about, bringing their ills for treatment at the hands of foreign physicians. From the country around Nâblus, for instance, many patients come to receive the skilful attention of the surgeon at the Church Missionary Society Hospital in the city. Among these cases are many suffering with diseased bones.
The medical department of the American College at Beirut is an exponent of modern medical science for all Syria. There native physicians are trained in medicine and pharmacy and go to all parts of the Turkish empire, Egypt and the Sudan. The European hospitals in the country are in charge of expert physicians assisted by well-trained nurses.
Here and there one meets dumb people. In Râm Allâh is a dumb man, the well-to-do father of a considerable family. He is keen, alert and very skilful at making himself understood by motions.
The blind are receiving some attention. Schneller’s school in Jerusalem makes provision for them. Miss Lovell, an English woman, has a small school for blind girls where she works assiduously for their welfare. The French Roman Catholic Sisters care for some.
The first hospital asylum in all Syria for the humane and scientific treatment of the insane was founded a few years ago and first opened to patients August 9, 1900. It is just a short drive out of Beirut, at a place called ‛Aṣfûrîyeh, within the Lebanon government district. Its founders are Mr. and Mrs. Theophilus Waldemeier. Mr. Waldemeier was for over twenty years the superintendent of the English Friends’ Mission at Brummana and other stations in Mount Lebanon. Advancing years seemed to make it wisest that he should relinquish the many-sided mission work. With his wife he planned a world tour in the interests of a work which he had thought over for many years. While friends were advising and expecting him to take a deserved rest he began to plan for this new enterprise, which he sweetly calls his “evening sacrifice”; a hospital for the right treatment of the insane, of which the country has many. The Waldemeiers visited successfully in Europe and America and returned with funds to build. They found a fine property of over thirty acres belonging to one of the effendîyeh class of natives, a Moslem who was in need of funds and good enough not to make too hard terms with these philanthropists. In the first two years the institution treated two hundred twenty-seven patients and sent away thirty-six patients recovered.
Mr. Waldemeier and his gifted wife treated us with the greatest cordiality, when we called on them, and showed us detail after detail of the work, the new building and so on, just as if they were enthusiastic devotees of an interesting new game; and so they are devotees of the old, the ever new game, of doing good. A large, well-equipped administration building, another for women patients and still another one for men were already up and fully used, forty patients at a time being the capacity. A new building was being erected to be used for the most violent cases. The story of some cases is a sad one. A surgeon of the Egyptian army was with us as we inspected the wards where the women patients are kept, filled mostly with young girls. He said, “I never saw anything so sad. The wounded and the dying on the battle-field do not make me feel like this.” The causes of the troubles of these sufferers are various. Ten distinct kinds of mania are recorded on the books, among them cases resulting from alcoholic excess, from typhoid fever and those that are hereditary. No patients are received unless there is reasonable expectation of their recovery under treatment.