We thought of setting imagination to cure what imagination had created, by solemnly tying our friend down, making a small wound on his stomach, and then exhibiting some scrap of raw meat to him as the donkey’s brain, safely extracted. We have known of similar cases cured by precisely that method elsewhere; particularly a girl in Mosul[{328}] who was persuaded that she had swallowed a lizard, which was eating her up internally. She fully intended to die of it; but recovered perfectly on being chloroformed and being shown, on “coming to” again, a small cut on her own person, and a lizard in spirits! However, the patient in this case refused to submit to the operation, and perhaps it was as well; for one is rather playing with fire in executing such a scheme.
On another occasion, a Kurd came to one of our European staff, with a request to have a tooth extracted. The Frank, who had served some apprenticeship at that art, did his office deftly; and the Kurd, filled with gratitude, offered two mejids (seven shillings) as a fee. This was refused, as no fees were taken; and the patient was even more astonished. However, he was a Mussulman gentleman, and to receive a benefit without making return for it was unthinkable; hence if his next proposal was bizarre, at least the kindness was genuine.
“Look here, Effendim, you are a Christian, are you not? Well, when I get to Paradise, I shall have seventy houris. You will not have any where you are going; and I think I may spare you—two!”
An interesting corollary to the above proposition would seem to be that the market value of a houri is 3/6 sterling, plus compound interest on that sum for say twenty years, which seems cheap.
Perhaps our most remarkable patient, however, was a poor fellow who was brought in by a deputation of the men of his village, with a request that we would cure him of the evil eye! If he looked at a crock of milk, it upset; if at a sheep, the wolf got it; if at a child, it was likely enough to tumble into the fire. They were quite fair about the matter, fully recognizing that it was the poor fellow’s misfortune, not his fault. Still, he was such a nuisance to all the neighbours, that it was to be hoped that English knowledge would cure him. Unfortunately, we had to own that there was nothing in the British Pharmacopœia that professes to deal with this form of trouble; and though we had, as a matter of fact, plenty of charms against the evil[{329}] eye in our possession (invocations of the Archangel Gabriel against “that light and vile daughter of perdition” with power to send it away “into the desolate land, where cocks crow not and foot of beast treads not, there to walk up and down in dry places, seeking rest and finding none”) yet we felt on the whole that it would not be proper to use these, and the deputation had to go away disappointed.[145]
Once, on a journey, we have known surgical aid demanded in rather menacing fashion. We had halted by a spring, when a party of Kurds, all fully armed of course, turned up from the opposite direction, and demanded of our servant who and what we might be. Hearing that we were English, the leader strode over to us at once, displayed a paralysed arm, and observed, “You have got to cure that.”
“That is quite beyond our power, we fear,” said we, “you must take that to the hospital in Mosul.”
“Well you know, I think you ought to cure it; because you did it.”
“We did it? We never set eyes on you before.”
“Well, if it was not you, it was your Consul; but you English are all one set. He did it when he was shooting at us.”