Dr. Main deals with his patients in the same cheery way that he addresses every one; a word or two suffices to discover the nature of their ailment. If the case is very serious, the patient is detained for further examination; if it is trivial, it is attended to at once by a native dresser. For the rest he himself prescribes.
Then he takes us up to the wards, and explains that the great difficulty is to get the Chinese to care for cleanliness. That is the same story in every hospital; they cannot believe it matters very much whether the thing is kept clean or not. The medical students will proceed to handle anything after they have washed their hands and think that the previous washing insures asepticism, regardless of the fact that they have touched many septic things.
Dr. Main's hospital is typical of mission hospitals—Dr. Christie's hospital at Mukden, Dr. Gillison's at Hankow, Dr. Cochrane's at Peking, and many others. There are also hospitals for women. We saw many; the first we visited, the Presbyterian Hospital at Canton, was a good example, impressing us not only by its efficiency, but also by the great service it performed to the suffering masses of China by training women doctors, who are permitted to minister to their sisters when etiquette does not permit of male medical attendance. The lady who showed us round the hospital spoke English fluently; she was dressed in the dress of the Cantonese woman, which suited her profession admirably, as it consisted of a long black coat and trousers. Some hospitals are reserved for the very poor; at Nanking, for instance, Dr. Macklin showed us over his beggar hospital. He follows the parable of the Good Samaritan most literally, and wherever he finds a poor, starving, dying man, he brings him in. Clearly he cannot afford anything but a limited accommodation for these poor creatures, but he is on the whole most successful, and there is many a man whom poverty had brought near to death whose life he has saved. As one looked at those types of suffering humanity and realised the good that Dr. Macklin was doing, one felt that the days of saintly service were not over yet.
Another beautiful work is Dr. Main's leper hospital at Hangchow. It was a weird and strange experience to hear those lepers singing our old English hymns. Leprosy, as my readers doubtless know, does not often leave open sores; it slowly eats away the body while it leaves the skin intact; and so you see men without hands and arms yet with finger nails upon the stump, blind men without noses, and very commonly men whose voices are cracked and broken. These lepers are housed in an old temple, in one of the most beautiful situations in China—a situation which is supposed to be the original of the landscape on the old willow pattern plates; and the beauty of their surroundings contrasts strangely with their hideous forms and harsh voices. There was an infinite pathos when by that blue lake and purple mountain, those harsh but plaintive voices sang the old tune of "Jesu, lover of my soul"; and though we could not follow the Chinese words, the faces of these poor sufferers were eloquent in expressing how fully they felt the meaning of that hymn.
But above all we should mention the great work that is being carried on by Dr. Cochrane at Peking. He has managed to induce all the medical missions in Peking to unite in founding a great hospital—a hospital which has received the approval of Government. This successful example of federation has solved a difficult problem. No doubt the efficiency of medical missions in many a town is impeded by their want of unity. A mission body will open a medical mission, and will send out a doctor or even two in charge; one doctor must go on his furlough, another is perhaps ill, and the result is that the mission is closed. The commercial community are rather ready to point out that the mission hospital is closed in the summer when there is the greatest need for it. The answer to the taunt is the policy of federation. While it is next to impossible to keep open the mission hospitals in an unhealthy climate with a limited staff, it is perfectly possible to do it if the staff is increased. Every doctor in Central and Southern China must have a certain period of rest, otherwise he will not be able to stand the enervating effects of a semi-tropical climate; and however possible it is to keep white men at work for three or four years without a holiday, and I know commercial people claim that this has been done in certain individual instances, it is in reality the very poorest economy. The mission doctor is far too valuable a person to have his life cast away by such a foolish policy of extravagance. He must have his rest every year and his furlough every seven years. But it is not necessary that the hospitals should be closed if the staff is big enough; a certain number of the hospital staff can go on leave, and when they are rested, can come back and allow others to go in their turn. Dr. Cochrane has shown at Peking that such federation is possible, and the China Emergency Committee is making every effort to encourage a similar federation in other parts of China. Medical missions are splendid examples of Christian charity and love, but they are rather sad examples of the lack of unity among Christian men.
Analogous to the medical mission are the missions to the blind and the deaf. The blind are a striking example of how Christianity alleviates misery, for the blind in China learn to read more quickly than those who have sight. The teachers of the blind have invented a system of raised type by which the Chinaman can read every word that is pronounced in Chinese. It is not our letter system, which they would find difficult to understand, but something after the nature of the Japanese system. Each syllable is represented by a sign; so, strange as it may appear, the blind man not having to study the character learns to read more quickly than the man with normal sight. There is an excellent school for the blind at Peking, under Dr. Murray's superintendence. There is another at Hankow, where we saw a most striking instance of the beauty of holiness. One of the masters at this blind school was a blind man himself; he was a most ardent Christian; he had been taught to play the organ, which, indeed, is a speciality at that school, many of the organists in the mission churches in Hankow coming from it, and one could not look upon his face without feeling a conviction that his spiritual vision was as clear as his physical sight was dark.
There is a fourth reason, and one which applies as much to educational missions as to medical missions, why both are fitting and proper ways to teach Christianity. Christianity claims to and does benefit the whole of man, not merely his spiritual side. Mankind cannot properly be cut up and divided into spirit, mind, and body. He is essentially one, and it is most necessary that those who are learning about our religion, should understand that while we claim every benefit should come from the spiritual part of our nature, we are prepared to show that we in no wise despise the body, which needs religious care as much as the soul. Neither are we careless about the mind. So the three parts of mission work go hand in hand, for preaching and prayer will heal the ills of the soul, the medical mission deals with the ills of the body, and the educational mission makes the mind healthy and strong. We shall deal with the educational side of mission work later on.