A Vendetta of the Desert

by W. C. Scully

Uncle Diederick, judging from the extent of his practice, ought to have made a fortune,—and he probably would have done so had he been paid for his services in cash instead of in kind. He was really a useful personage and saved many a life. His absorbing taste for medicine and surgery—joined to his undoubted natural ability, would have made him a successful if not an eminent practitioner had he had the necessary training.

When a boy he had obtained possession of an old book upon anatomy, and from this he gained a fair general knowledge of the human frame. Later he acquired a manual of simple surgery and another of household medicine (as practiced in the Eighteenth Century), and upon these was founded his professional eminence. These books were kept strictly in the background, their size and binding not being impressive, but the old Italian herbal was invariably referred to in the presence of the patient before diagnosis was completed.

Even at this day every Boer woman in the outlying districts who has reached the age of forty, considers herself competent to treat all of the ills that flesh is heir to. Her pharmacopoeia is a limited one, consisting, as it does, of some seven or eight drugs, all more or less violent in their effects upon the human organism. In her choice of these in prescribing she is guided solely by her intuitions. A century ago the number and quantity of drugs at her disposal was more limited, and therefore the mortality from this cause was less than at the present day.

But Uncle Diederick was a quack of a different class. He knew well enough that in a large number of cases the best chance of recovery lay in leaving Nature quite to herself. Like Paracelsus, however, he had to live down to the prejudices of his age. Many a bulky bottle of nasty but innocuous mixture did he prescribe to amplitudinous tanta or corpulent oom, whose only complaint was the natural result of too much exercise of the jaw-bones and too little of the arms and legs.

The old women looked upon Uncle Diederick with jealousy, but they could not help admitting that in surgery, at all events, he was far their superior. In the case of a broken limb or a wound from a Bushman’s poisoned arrow he was the first person thought of,—if the accident occurred within a radius of a hundred miles of his dwelling. Many a miserable sufferer has been brought to the “hartebeeste house” from distances that entailed a week’s travelling over wretched roads in a jolting wagon.

In medicine Uncle Diederick did not by any means stick to the orthodox pharmacopoeia; he supplemented the few crude drugs in general use by a number of decoctions and infusions of different herbs, the properties of which he had learnt from Hottentots and captive Bushmen,—with whom he often managed to make friends.

As the effect of these remedies was quite equal in violence to that of those in common use, and as there was an added element of mystery about them, Uncle Diederick’s treatment was generally popular. The Boer does not believe in any medicine which is not administered in large doses and which does not act as a kind of physiological earthquake upon the invalid.

Uncle Diederick was a widower with an only daughter. He had lost his wife soon after marriage, and, contrary to the general custom, had not remarried. Jacomina, his daughter, was a comely damsel of seventeen, whose keen and practical interest in her father’s pursuits boded a terrible future for her prospective husband and family. It was she who presided, like another Medea, over the brewing of the decoctions; it was she who neatly bound up and carefully stored away the different kinds of dried herbs from which these decoctions were made. In fact she knew almost as much as her father did about the healing art. Where she shone brightest, however, was in collecting payment for her father’s services.

Many suitors had laid their hearts at Jacomina’s substantial feet, while she, on her part, cherished a passion for the handsome, melancholy Adrian van der Walt, Gideon’s son. Adrian likewise admired her, but his diffidence kept him from definitely telling her so, or doing more than gaze at her in deep but hopeless admiration whenever he thought himself unobserved in her company. For many months Jacomina had put forth all her arts to bring Adrian to the proposing point, but his unconquerable shyness always stood in the way of the desired result. At a distance Adrian was brave enough, but in the presence of his beloved his courage fled. On several occasions he had pretended to be ill in order to have an excuse for visiting the “hartebeeste house,” when the nasty decoctions he received from the hands of Jacomina tasted as sweet as nectar.

One day Uncle Diederick was sitting just inside the door of his dwelling engaged in the commonplace occupation of mending his saddle. From the road behind the kopje at the foot of which he dwelt came the rattle and rumble of an approaching wagon. He at once hid the saddle in a corner under a sheep skin, went over to his table, opened the herbal volume and began poring over its pages. It was thus that he was usually found by his patients. Jacomina was on the watch. Shortly after the wagon came in sight she put her head in through the doorway.