Pioneer Medical Mission Work in Mosul (Nineveh)[1]
Winning the confidence of the people—Native surgery—Difficulties to be overcome—Backward patients—Encouraging work—Prevalent diseases—Lunatics—Possible future of Mesopotamia.
”... My soul is full
Of pity for the sickness of this world;
Which I will heal, if healing may be found!”
Sir E. Arnold.
It is often thought that in the East, whenever an English doctor arrives at a city, patients throng to him from all quarters. This is only partially true, at least in the near East. If medicine and attendance are granted free indiscriminately, doubtless at first crowds will attend the out-patient department, many coming merely out of curiosity. If good work is to be done, it is better to make some charge, however small, exempting only the very poor. This principle has, I believe, been adopted by all our medical missionaries, and fees thus earned go to help in making the work self-supporting.
The European doctor in Persia or Turkey has first to win the confidence of the people, and this is sometimes no easy matter. On our arrival in Mosul we rented a house in the centre of the city, which had two compounds. We lived in the inner compound, and made the outer into a dispensary and small hospital. At first everything looked rather hopeless, the house being an old one and nearly in ruins. However, we made a big stable into a waiting-room for the patients; other rooms were patched up and transformed into consulting-room, dispensary, operating theatre, and wards, all of a most primitive kind. In this great city of 60,000 to 80,000 people our staff consisted of my wife and me and two native assistants, who had been trained in our Baghdad Medical Mission.
There was no lack of physicians in the city, but excluding two or three Turkish army doctors, and one or two others with Constantinople diplomas, the rest were quacks of the most pronounced type. Nearly every old lady in the city thinks herself competent to treat diseases of the eye, the barbers are the surgeons, bone-setters abound, hereditary physicians are by no means scarce. These latter inherit “herbal prescriptions” from their forefathers, and though now forbidden to practise by the Turkish Government, yet contrive to visit many houses as a “friend” after dark, and earn enough for a livelihood. The Dominicans (who have a large Mission in Mosul) also give away many medicines, and have now a qualified native doctor. But though there is much “physicking” in Mosul, but little surgery is done, and that gives the opportunity for the European doctor to step in. Arab surgery is of the crudest description. Let one sample suffice. A poor Arab woman was brought to the dispensary, soon after we started work, by her father. She complained of not being able to breathe through her nose. On examining her throat I found that the upper air passage had become shut off from the back of the throat as a result of old inflammation. Upon further inquiry I elicited the following history. Two years before, the patient had developed a bad sore throat. Her father took her to the native surgeon, who had the poor woman’s mouth held forcibly open, while he proceeded to cure the sore throat by rubbing it with a red-hot flattened piece of iron!
Gradually we commenced to win the confidence of the people: they came in ever-increasing numbers to the dispensary. Gathered together in the waiting-room would be a crowd composed of many different nationalities—Christians, Moslems, Jews, Kurds from the mountains, Bedouins from the desert, Yezidees (the so-called devil-worshippers), a motley throng, listening quietly and without interruption to the reading and exposition of the Gospel, ere passing one by one through the doctor’s consulting-room, for the treatment of their multitudinous diseases. The medical missionary is called upon to do his best to cure every ailment; he must be ready to accept heavy responsibilities, there are no “specialists” to consult, often he is without the help of any trained nurse, and in pioneer work, at least, he has no properly equipped hospital, and must perforce perform most serious operations under the worst possible conditions. In addition to all this, in lands under Mohammedan rule there is always the risk of a riot if a patient should die in a Christian hospital, especially on the operating table. Yet despite all these drawbacks, it is a grand life, revealing to a man his own utter weakness, and making him rely more and more upon his God.