One woman paid for her bottle in kind—four eggs. Some of the bottles were absurdly small; others the reverse, for one woman appeared carrying a great earthenware water-pot standing three feet high.
"My daughter," she said to Miss Banks, "I want medicine."
"Yes, but I cannot give you medicine in such a huge pot."
"My daughter, I have been three days on the road, and I want much medicine."
Another woman, who looked old and decrepit, begged and prayed that a bottle might be given her. Miss Banks was adamant. The woman whined and entreated from ten till half-past eleven: "I am too poor to buy one. Look at me; I am ill," and so on—until at last one of the other missionaries begged Miss Banks to give her a bottle and send her away. Still she refused to break her rule. The last patient got up to go. It was twelve o'clock. The old woman thrust her hand into the rag round her waist, pulled out a bottle, and handed it to Miss Banks to be filled.
The cases we saw were numerous. A mother with two little boys whose heads had to be examined: they were dispatched with a box of ointment (sulphur and oil) and a bottle of medicine. A boy with swelled glands had them painted. A woman had her chest painted, a man various parts of him. Pills, ointment, powders, etc., were distributed, with manifold instructions, repeated again and again, until the patient's clod-like brain had been penetrated and set in motion. Even then one would turn round at the door and say, "Then I am to eat this ointment?"
A woman was given some salts wrapped in paper, to be mixed with water and taken the next morning fasting. She did not come again for a month, and she brought with her a large earthen pot half full of water and paper. She had mixed the salts in this with their wrapping, and had been drinking a mouthful daily, but felt no better.
Miss Banks gave a woman in good circumstances a bottle of medicine which was to last her eight days, and be taken after food; also some liniment for external use. An urgent summons came two days later: the woman was dying. "I thought it did me so much good that last night I took all the rest, and then I drank the liniment," she said. She recovered.
A man did the same with pills—was so much pleased with the effect of one that he devoured the rest all at once. They invariably ate the paper in which pills or powders were wrapped.
On one occasion Miss Banks went to see a girl whom she was attending, and who seemed worse. The answer, when asked if she was having her medicine regularly, was, "Oh no! she's so ill just now. When she's a little better, we shall give it to her."
