Whatever may have been the first effect of being compelled to enter upon his profession alone, it is doubtful whether Dr. House ever perceived that this constraint was probably one means by which he gained the confidence of the Siamese within a very short period. For instead of being regarded either as a competitor or as an assistant to Dr. Bradley, he was accepted at the outset upon the reputation which his predecessor had so firmly established. It was this repute of western medicine which caused the great man to send so promptly for an unknown physician to treat the self-mutilated servant.
Quickly it became known among the people of Bangkok that another physician had arrived. The calls for treatment came in such numbers and with such importunity that in self-defense it was deemed wise to open the dispensary which had remained closed since the departure of Dr. Bradley, although there was only a limited supply of drugs on hand and the nearest base of supplies was London. The dispensary, or hospital as it was sometimes called, of which Dr. House thus suddenly found himself the proprietor and whole staff, was just one of the innumerable floating houses which lined the river banks of the Siamese capital. It is said that when this new capital was being established the common people were not allowed to build houses on land but permitted to live only in boats. At any rate, until modern times the larger portion of the population lived in floating houses.
These houses are simply constructed. A raft of bamboo forms the foundation, which is moored to the bank or to poles driven into the mud. Upon that foundation a one-story house of boards, thatched with palm leaves, is built. The house is, customarily, divided into three rooms. At either end, extending clear across the floor is a kitchen and a common bedroom. The space between is occupied by the common living-room and a porch. The living-room is fully open along the porch, from which it is separated by the rise of a step. Closely packed together in irregular rows, sometimes two or three deep, these houses are ranged along the banks of the river and of the many canals that form the Venetian highways of the city. The channel beneath the houses, kept from being stagnant by movement of the tide, served at once as the sewer and the family bath. Many of these houses are occupied as stores, with their merchandise exposed to the full view of the customer who does his shopping in a boat.
It was such a house as this that served the missionary as a hospital. But “hospital” is scarcely the proper word to use judged from the equipment, which consisted of a chair or two, a table for operations and a few mats for the patients. But the place had one great advantage—the open side exposed the work of the foreign doctor to the gaze of the curious natives who stopped while passing in their boats, and then related to their friends the wonders they had seen.
Here in this rude native shelter, until he gave up his profession, Dr. House applied himself with deep devotion and self-abandon to relieving the physical sufferings of the people. He placed himself wholly at their service, and made no discrimination between rank of those he served. Frequently he would not reach the dinner table till the middle of the afternoon, detained by the importuning patients; and he even laments that the people would not summon him in the night time in case of serious need.
SOME TYPICAL CASES
His record of patients, to one who is not familiar with a physician’s records, gives astonishment at the kind of cases which seemed to predominate. One class was the ulcers and running sores—many of them most aggravated. These usually were the result of long-neglected wounds. He writes of extracting bamboo splinters great and small that had become imbedded in the flesh and remained there to produce serious inflammation and infection. In such cases an ignorance too dense for intelligence to comprehend was the contributory cause of untold suffering. A second class of cases frequently appearing was that of fresh wounds resulting from drunken brawls, street fights, treachery and revenge, or self-mutilation. Scarcely a week passed but a patient was brought in with head cut open, face gashed, back lashed, or some other gaping cut. But most loathsome of all were the diseases which the doctor characterised as the result of vices—diseases which found victims among all sorts and conditions of men who “working that which is unseemly” received “in themselves that recompense of their errors which was meet.”
A cursory review of one day’s succession of patients will be suggestive. Here returns a man with a tumor on his ear, having the previous day been advised to come for an operation:
“With good courage and I believe without a trembling hand, I sat down to this, my first operation not only in the Kingdom of Siam, but the first operation I think I ever undertook. It was a simple one, and oh, I cannot but catch such a glimpse of my Father’s loving-kindness in thus gently leading his poor ignorant by such simpler cases into the confidence in myself necessary to do the more serious cases which will doubtless fall to my lot.... Believing that without His blessing the simplest operation would fail and with it the most doubtful one might prosper, I lifted up my heart a moment to Him in whose name I had ventured to come among this people to try to do them good.”
While attending him, a boat came up with two women, one a loathsome object full of sores and scabs—face, hands and limbs—the scars of former ulcers. A Chinaman with a scrofulous neck—a lad with gastric derangement—a boy whose leg was transfixed with a sharp piece of bamboo—so moves the procession. As he returns late for dinner he observes: