Children of Persia

by Mrs. Napier Malcolm

My cook asked me one day, with tears, to go and see his baby; they had given it smallpox to get it over, and it had taken it badly. I am glad to say it recovered. He had not thought it necessary to make any difference in his cooking for us, while he was spending his nights with a baby with smallpox. Another missionary’s cook brought his little boy with smallpox to the kitchen because it was more cheerful for him than being at home; he could lie and watch his father cooking.

So the Persians do not take much trouble to prevent their children from getting ill. How do they care for them when they are ill?

First of all they start doctoring them themselves, except in smallpox, when they say it is dangerous to give any medicine. For other illnesses they give plenty of medicine, not in little teaspoonfuls, but in nice big bowlfuls, and the nastier it is the more good they think it will do. On the whole Persian children are exceedingly good about taking their medicine, but whether they are or not they have to take it. One way of giving it to naughty children is to pour it through their noses from a little tin cup with a long narrow spout.

If the child gets no better the doctor is consulted; very often two or three doctors are called in, and sometimes the parents follow the doctor’s advice, but very often they do not. It depends partly on the beads, and a good deal on how much they have paid. If they pay much they generally make the patient take all the medicine for fear their money should be wasted. If the doctor seems unable to cure the patient a reader is called in, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, who reads the Quran over the patient in the hope that it may effect a cure where medical treatment has failed.

In the case of a long, tiresome illness, or when they despair of recovery, it is not uncommon for the patient’s friends to hasten the end by giving a dose of poison.

One girl, who had very little the matter with her, but was always making a fuss over her ailments, gave her family a great deal of trouble with her fancies. They found her recovery was likely to be slow, and although she was going on well they one day told the doctor that “they had given her sherbet and she had died.”

I myself was several times asked to give poison in the form of medicine, and I think they were rather surprised when I told them how Christians regard such a thing.

When the medical missionary starts work he may be puzzled by the very common request that he will give the second medicine first. It appears that the people think, with how much truth I cannot say, that their doctors give first a medicine to make the patient worse and then one to make him better.

Perhaps that was what the devoted old grandmother was thinking of, who had brought her poor little granddaughter in from a village many miles away, very, very ill with rheumatic fever. She called in the English doctor, and got her medicine from the dispensary, but when the doctor called next day, she said she had not given the child any, because she remembered she had never asked if it would do her good and so she was afraid to try it.

It must surely have been in the minds of the friends of one patient who came to the missionary, and said their friend was worse every time she took her medicine, and they wanted some more, it was doing her so much good.