Hongkong is ever increasing its hospital equipment, which is now the most extensive in the Far East. Some of the buildings erected on the mountain peaks are palatial. On the western slope of Victoria Mount there is the worldwide known Tung Wah Hospital, managed by Chinese educated in the medical schools of Britain, America and Hongkong. At this hospital Doctor Sun Yat Sen, the first president of China, was a student some years ago. Over Bowen Road, above the clouds of Mount Wanchai, is the sumptuous Military Hospital, and at the foot of the mountain is the no less splendid Naval Hospital. On Mount Kellett is Sharp’s Hospital, and on Victoria Peak is the Peak Hospital. There is the Civil Hospital, the Nethersole Hospital, hospitals over on the mainland at Kowloon, and there will be a railroad hospital at Kowloon. Canton has copied from Hongkong. The Chinese there are modernizing their ancient guild hospitals which lie outside of the eastern wall. Philanthropy in only the smallest of the Hongkong hospitals has been depended upon, most of them being municipal or service hospitals. At Canton is the immense Doctor Peter Parker Hospital, founded in 1835, for which the American Presbyterian women of Philadelphia furnish the medical missionaries. There are 300 beds, and 25,000 patients are treated annually. The Chinese do their part, having presented a building for a medical college. The Gregg Hospitals for Women at Canton is presided over by Doctors Mary Fulton and Mary Niles, and the Chinese have given $3,500 for a children’s ward. At Kowkiang, on the Yangtze, there is the model Danforth Memorial Hospital, erected with American money and presided over by a noted Chinese lady physician who has taken the name of Miss Mary Stone, and who graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School.
In remote large Hainan Island, in Suchow, at Paoting, Chingtu, Peking, etc., there are American Presbyterian hospitals. Where there are now hundreds there will soon be thousands of medical missionaries and more medical colleges to fit the Chinese to help themselves. It is the most important work in China,—more important even than foreign loans for railways and industrials, and far more important than loans for armies and navies. Doctor F. C. Yen, of Yale Medical College, Changsha, is a fine example of a native medical man, trained in the best that the West knows. Several American universities have opened medical schools in China, the University of Pennsylvania at Canton, Yale at Changsha in stern conservative Hunan province; and now Harvard proposes to open a medical school possibly at Shanghai, to be staffed by the Harvard Medical School, and the diseases which they will attack are China’s curses, the dangers of the world,—the skin diseases, tumors, the two plagues, cholera, dysentery, leprosy, malaria and consumption. One-third of the money for the Scotch Presbyterian Hospital and medical college at Mukden was contributed by the Chinese, who now warmly appreciate Western medicine.
The day is not distant when the Chinese, placed on their feet in finance, will pay half the expense of medical missions. The Chinese give liquorice to men and animals as a cure for wasting diseases. From the skin of a venomous toad their doctors derive a preparation which they call Sen-so. It is a far more powerful stimulus to heart action than our drug digitalis. It is well known that deer’s horns are ground to powder by the old-fashioned Chinese doctors. In the valley of the Wei River, just north of the Peling range in far western Kansu province, stags are raised in enclosures for this purpose. The soft prongs of the horn are cut off in summer time. The old-fashioned doctors of China never dissected, as abuse of the body is contrary to Confucianism. They knew nothing of circulation, and little of anatomy, physiology or chemistry. “Then Confucianism must go,” say the new Chinese scientists. Two of their medical proverbs are:
“A physician may cure every disease except the disease of Fate.”
“Send for the diagnostician before the druggist, for the cure must fit the disease.”
Four great tropical medicine colleges have been opened outside of the Orient. The first was the University of Liverpool School. Then followed the London School of Tropical Medicine, and the Hamburg School of the Germans. Now the New York Tropical Medical School has been opened at Twentieth Street and Second Avenue. The work will include the translation of text-books, and America will be able to do much for Southern China in the clinic on ships which the school will have as soon as the Panama Canal is open. Serums have yet to be found for the paralyzing dengue which every foreigner in China has suffered from at one time or another: typhus, anæmia, dum-dum, tze-tze, sleeping sickness, amoebic dysentery, malaria and pneumonic plague, though the indefatigable Doctor Kitasato found a temporary serum for the last named.
The medical works translated into Chinese by medical missionaries include the following: Doctor J. G. Kerr’s (first teacher of Doctor Sunyacius) translation of Bartholow’s Practise of Medicine, Doctor S. A. Hunter’s translation of a Materia Medica and Pharmacopœia, Doctor Dudgeon’s translation of Gray’s Anatomy, Doctor Porter’s translation of a physiology, Doctor Mary Fulton’s Diseases of Children; Nursing in Surgery, and Gynecology, etc.
When I think of the trials of the Orient in its heated, humid, equatorial region, where I lived for three years; and the hardships, dangers and life-remembered punishment of its unavoidable, various diseases, I am inclined to suggest in this book the formation of an “Equator Club,” eligibility for membership in which shall be at least two years’ uninterrupted residence between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Such an experience was certainly a unique and trying one, a tremendous test of physique, as a growing number, who have endured it, will confess, and a perpetuated remembrance of those days, and an interest in the successors who have followed one to take up the white man’s growing burdens in those realms of the imperious sun, would certainly do good.