At the Court of the Amîr: A Narrative

by John Alfred Gray

The patients lay in the garden: some were under the trees, others were protected by long thatched roofs supported on poles. None were in the house. In Tash Kurghán the patients with festering wounds were shut in a house when they should have been out in the open. Here they were out in the open, lying on the earth, and dying by scores from malarial fever. They should have been in the house, which was cool, and raised four or five feet above the earth.

There were about three hundred patients when I arrived, most of them down with severe Remittent fever. The Hakims were treating the fever by bleeding, purging, and starvation. Had they left the men untreated some of them might have recovered: as it was, the victims were being carried out five and six a day. In spite of their want of success, the Hakims continued blindly and persistently with their mode of treatment.

I walked round examining the patients and determining what I would do. Evidently it was useless taking the poor fellows who were already drained of their blood by the Hakims. I must take the new comers if I was to succeed in the essential object of medical treatment, that of curing the patient. I therefore directed that all new comers—and they poured into the hospital—should be taken to the inner garden and their beds arranged in the vacant rooms of the house there. A sentry was posted at the gate of the inner garden, with orders to shoot any Hakim attempting to enter.

One room contained a heterogeneous collection of European drugs and surgical instruments. In a small room on the roof lived a Hindustani hospital assistant—the gentlemanly dipsomaniac whom I have already introduced. There were two other Hindustani assistants, but they were utterly and hopelessly ignorant. These men happily had spared the patients. They had done no work at all.

I had, therefore, the first day seven or eight new cases secluded from the rest under my own hands, and, excluding bribery, beyond the reach of Hakims. After some months, when I had become known, I found whom I could trust, and did not take such stringent precautions.

Afghan Appreciation of Medical Treatment.

I made a preliminary round of my cases with a note-book, for, at that time, distinguish Mahomed Akbar from Mahomed Hassan, and him from Mahomed Hussain or Gul Mahomed, I could not. I then made a second round with medicines, which were administered before me; for the possibility of bribery occurred to me, and I knew the Hakims would shrink from nothing to bring discredit upon a Feringhi interloper. My wards filled rapidly, and for a week I had no deaths, the fever yielding readily to quinine. The difference in the mortality after European and after native treatment was naturally striking, and the news spread far and wide, especially among the soldiers, the poorer townsfolk and the peasants, so that I soon had far more work before me than I could possibly get through in the day.

The way my time was allotted may be interesting.

After a light breakfast I galloped off to the hospital at daybreak, to escape the intense heat. Having completed my rounds there I returned home about eleven, washed and changed, putting on a dry suit of flannel; then, lying on a couch in the inner room, with all the doors and windows shut to keep out the heat, I munched some of the most delicious fruit—peaches, grapes, and melons—that it has ever been my good fortune to taste. At this time I had not become saturated with malaria, and I could eat fruit without any evil resulting. I slept for an hour, had lunch, and at two o’clock repaired to an underground room, which was comparatively cool, to see the patients, townsfolk, and soldiers who had been gathering in crowds round the house. I continued attending to them till six in the evening and then ceased, whether there were many or few remaining. After dinner I saw the one or two favoured ones who had obtained from the Amîr a special order for me to visit them at their homes.