By the Author of "The Child Wives and Widows of India," Etc.

This was Dr. Elmslie's last journey. He hardly realised, as he dragged his weary limbs over rough but familiar paths, that one object for which he had struggled for years was practically accomplished. He sank from exhaustion on the way, and the day after his death Government granted permission for missionaries to spend the winter in the Valley of Kashmir. Still farther was he from knowing of another result of his labours. He had appealed to Englishwomen to bring the gifts of healing to suffering and secluded inmates of zenanas. Dr. Elmslie had found a direct way to the hearts of prejudiced heathen men. The sick came to him for healing, and learnt the meaning of his self-denying life.

"Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life," are ancient words of wisdom; but this rule has exceptions. To Hindu women, at least, caste is dearer than life. It would be as easy to restore the down to a bruised butterfly's wing as to give back self-respect, and with it all that makes life worth living, to a zenana lady who has been exposed to the gaze or touch of a man other than a near relation. Custom of the country debars a respectable woman from receiving ministry to body, soul, or mind, unless it comes from one of her own sex. Dr. Elmslie's appeal resulted in Miss Fanny Butler's offer of service to the Indian Female Normal School and Instruction Society. She was the first enrolled student of the London School of Medicine, which had just been transferred from Edinburgh, and passed second out of one hundred and twenty-three candidates, one hundred and nineteen of whom were men, in the Preliminary Arts Examination. She went to India in October, 1880, the first fully qualified medical missionary to women.

Seventeen years after Dr. Elmslie's death Dr. Fanny Butler obtained another concession for Kashmir, the permission for missionaries to live within the city of Srinagar. She saw the foundations of a new hospital for women begun within the city, and fourteen days after she also laid down what, an hour before her death, she described as a "good long life," in the service of Kashmiri people. The age of thirty-nine, she said to the friends who surrounded her, and who felt that she of all others could not be spared, was "not so very young to die," and she sent an earnest plea to the Church of England Zenana Society, the division of the old society to which she belonged, to send someone quickly to take her place. The new hospital was the gift of Mrs. Bishop (Miss Isabella Bird) in memory of her husband. She had seen the dirty crowd of suffering women at the dispensary door overpower two men, and the earliest arrivals precipitated head foremost by the rush from behind, whilst numbers were turned away in misery and disappointment.

Hospitals and dispensaries have rapidly increased since the day of pioneers. Absolute necessity has forced medical work on many missionaries in the field. The most elementary knowledge of nursing and hygiene appears miraculous to women sunk in utter ignorance. A white woman too modest to give them remedies for every ailment is usually regarded as unkind. A neglected missionary dispensary is practically unknown.

At the time when the Countess Dufferin started her admirable scheme for providing medical aid for Indian women a well-known Anglo-Indian surgeon stated publicly that, whatever other qualification was required in a candidate, two were absolutely necessary: she must be a lady in the highest sense of the word, and she must be a Christian, and he proceeded to give good reasons for what he said. The experience of every woman who has taken up this work would bear out his sentiments. Without courtesy and ready intuition of the feelings of others it would be hard to get an entrance into zenanas, and nothing but love and devotion to her Master would enable a woman to persevere in spending her life amongst sick heathen women, in spite of sights, scenes, and vexations beyond conception in England.

The greatest difficulties are probably met in high-caste zenanas. There, in the midst of unhealthy surroundings, the friends and neighbours have grand opportunities of undoing any good that may have been accomplished. It is grievous to a medical missionary to find her fever patient dying from a douche of cold water, because the white woman has defiled her high caste by feeling her pulse. It is enough to make her give up a case in despair if, after she has explained that quiet is absolutely necessary, the friends and neighbours decide that the evil spirit supposed to be in possession must be driven out by the music of tom-toms. A Hindu man is said to "sin religiously," and a Hindu woman excels him in devotion to her creed. A fever patient in the Punjab refused to drink milk—the one thing of all others that her medical woman ordered her—because she said, if it were the last thing she swallowed, her soul would pass into the body of a cobra. One medical missionary found a woman, who was in a critical state, lying on a mat, whilst an old woman, supposed to be learned in sickness, stood on her body, or patrolled up and down like a sentinel, as far as the length would admit. This was kindly meant. Another found one suffering seriously from the effect of a linseed poultice. She had carefully explained the mysteries of making and applying it, but in her absence the patient's friends had spread dry linseed over her chest and poured boiling water over it.

Happily, all the women in India are not secluded in zenanas. By far the largest proportion live in the villages, but their notions of propriety are very strict. The hard-working field-women will hide themselves on the suspicion of a sahib being within reach. When once they are satisfied that the visitor belongs to their own sex and is harmless, crowds beset the missionary encampments. Many tales of suffering are poured into sympathising ears.

"I am blind from crying for my only son" is not an infrequent complaint. Nothing can be done in this case.

"There is no god or goddess to love a Hindu woman. Whatever offerings we make her, the goddess of small-pox smites us, and then the men say the women have not offered enough, and are angry." This was the reply of a Punjabi woman, who spoke for her friends and neighbours.

One Bengali woman told a missionary of the death of a precious baby boy. There did not seem much the matter, but the hakim (a native quack) first gave him something burning to swallow, and then applied a red-hot iron to each side in turn; and the child only drew one or two breaths after this treatment. This also, one hopes, was kindly meant. The Hindus are by no means wanting in humanity, but ignorance is often as fatal as cruelty.

Many patients find an excuse for coming again and again to the dispensaries. There they hear of blessings in this world and the next which they say seem too good to be true. They see love shining in the earnest faces, and feel it in the touch of hands that will not shrink from dressing repulsive sores.

The majority of cases in dispensaries are ordinary fevers or skin diseases resulting from dirt, and other scourges that follow defiance of elementary rules of health.

Patients discharged as cured often return. "Tell me again that Name that I can say when I pray," one of them asked, to explain the reappearance of her shrivelled old face; "I forget so soon." And she went on her way repeating the Name that even some of the heathen realise must be exalted above all others.

"I know that your Jesus must reign over our land," a Punjabi woman said to a lady who had opened a dispensary at Tarn Taran, a sacred city of the Sikhs; "I know it, because your religion is full of love and ours has none at all."

The mission hospital at this city, with the name which literally means "The Place of Salvation," and the dispensary seen in the illustration, came mainly into being through the determination of the inhabitants. A suffering baby might claim a share in its existence. This infant's mother brought it to a missionary whose training as a nurse had made her a friend in sickness. The child's sight was hopelessly gone. The mother said that the hakim had told her alum was good for sore eyes, so she had put it under the lids.

"You have used it in such a way as to blind your baby," the missionary said; "and I could have told you what to do."

"How should I know?" the woman replied, using a common phrase to express helplessness or lethargy; but she told the story to her friends, and other mothers, whose babies' eyes were suffering, soon proved that the white woman had made no empty boast. Ophthalmia is terribly common in India, and its marvellous cures began to be famous.

One day a family party carried an invalid into the verandah of the Tarn Taran mission house. The missionary looked inside the doolie; she was not a doctor, and declined to undertake such a serious case, and told the men to take their invalid to the Amritsar Hospital. They were determined to take no such trouble. To show that she was equally determined to make them, she went inside the house and shut the doors and blinds. Who would hold out the longest? The result was a foregone conclusion. The Punjabis, armed with a greater disregard for a woman's life, gained the victory by the simple method of beating a retreat, leaving the helpless woman behind them. In common humanity she could not be left to die. In a few days her family returned to inquire, and were gratified to find her progressing towards recovery. The white woman's celebrity was now secured, and to her consternation and embarrassment she found her verandah full of patients, and, from overwork, was soon herself added to the number. The people of Tarn Taran afterwards gave the building for a Women's Mission Hospital, and a new one is now in the charge of a fully qualified lady doctor.

Hospitals are by far the most satisfactory part of medical missions. In zenanas and dispensaries it is one thing to prescribe and give advice, and another for orders to be obeyed, especially if they are contrary to rules of caste or custom. It is well known that a Hindu soldier, who will follow his British officer into the fiercest mÊlÉe, and, if necessary, die for him, if true to his own creed, will not receive a cup of water at his hands. When wounded his parched lips will close tightly, lest his caste should suffer. The same principle debars his womenfolk from accepting physic in a liquid form from Englishwomen. They may, however, take powders. Written directions are generally useless, and verbal ones often misunderstood. It is little wonder if dispensary patients make slow progress.

"Are you sure you took the medicine I gave you?" inquired a medical missionary of one who made no advance at all.

"Quite sure, Miss Sahiba."

"How did you take it?"

"I ate the paper and threw away the dust."

This mistake was not astonishing under the circumstances. One Mohammedan specific is to swallow a paper pellet with the name of God written in Arabic; another, for the mullah to write an Arabic inscription on a plate, and for the water that washes it off to be the dose.

It is well when superstition and misconception stop short at swallowing paper and inky water. A woman, seriously injured from an accident, was carried into the Duchess of Connaught Hospital, Peshawur. Her husband accompanied her, and saw the medical missionary in charge carefully attend to fractures and bruises. Rest and sleep and quiet were doing their work, and the man was left to watch. A sudden crash startled the ward. The husband had turned the bedstead over on its side, and flung his wife down. He fancied she was dying, and said it would imperil her soul if it departed whilst she lay on anything but the floor. He had the satisfaction of knowing that she died where he placed her. This was a case of a Hindu "sinning religiously." It would be harder to forgive the frequent sacrifice of life to superstition, if there were no ennobling element underlying it of honest desire for some vague spiritual good.

The Duchess of Connaught Hospital is a permanent memorial of her Royal Highness's kind interest in the women of India. Whilst on the North-Western Frontier she went through the Dispensary and Nursing Home which represented the first effort to bring medical aid to the Afghan women, and allowed it to be called after her name. A new and much larger building, of which a drawing has been reproduced, has taken the place of the native quarters, where Mohammedan bigotry was by slow degrees overcome. For years the ladies of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, who had charge of this hospital, were the only Europeans living within the walls of Peshawur. Every night the great city gates closed them in, and separated them from other missionaries and from Government servants. They chose to be in the midst of their work, and though outbreaks of Mohammedan fanaticism repeatedly checked teaching in schools and zenanas, ministry to the sick continued, and never lost the friendly confidence of Peshawuris.

In its early and humbler days, the fame of this hospital reached far-away Khorassan. A lady of that country who was suffering terribly, caused herself to be carried the fifteen days' journey to Peshawur. Miss Mitcheson, who opened the first dispensary, and is now the head of the hospital, saw that her case was critical and required an operation of a far more serious kind than she had ever attempted, and begged her to allow the civil surgeon to see her.

"I would rather die," the patient answered. The combined forces of suffering, fear of death, and persuasion, were powerless to move her. The Englishwoman, of whose powers she had heard in her own country, might do what she liked with her, but no man should come near her. Happily Miss Mitcheson successfully accomplished what was necessary, and the Khorassan lady made a good recovery. When the time came for parting from her new friends, she promised to use in her own country the knowledge she had gained in Peshawur. She kept her word, as more visitors from Khorassan testified, and they said she had not forgotten the benefits she had received in the mission hospital.

During Miss Mitcheson's absence in England Dr. Charlotte Wheeler, who with her fellow-workers, in the illustration on p. 102, stands in the verandah of the old building, superintended the medical work. On Miss Mitcheson's return, Miss Wheeler opened a medical mission amongst the women in Quetta. This work extended rapidly on and beyond the frontier, so that in November, 1896, when it was a year old, eight different languages were spoken on the same day in the dispensary waiting room.

Institutions for training Christian girls of India as doctors or nurses have come into existence as the number of candidates has increased and the necessity has arisen. The North India School of Medicine has been established at Ludhiana with this object. Many of the mission hospitals also have training classes. St. Catherine's Hospital, Amritsar, under the superintendence of Miss Hewlett, who has had nineteen years' experience, has provided very valuable assistant medical missionaries for stations in the Punjab and Bengal. At the last census a hundred Christian women—counting missionaries, assistants, patients, nurses and students—were within its walls. An illustration shows the inmates mustering before going to church.

One student in St. Catherine's Hospital, who had gained a scholarship, gave promise of a brilliant career. Before the time of study in which she delighted was over, the lady superintendent became suspicious of what this young girl described as broken chilblains on her fingers. A doctor was called in, and confirmed her impression that it was leprosy. An Eastern girl knows, what in Europe is only faintly imagined, of the horrors of this loathsome disease. One cry of anguish only escaped her when she was told the verdict. Then she rose above the trial, and resigned herself cheerfully to the will of God. She was prepared to start the next day for the Leper Settlement near Calcutta without meeting her friends or fellow-students for a word of farewell.

"What comforts me," she said to the Clerical Secretary of the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, who was in Amritsar at the time, "is that I may go as a missionary rather than as a patient."

She went to that place of death and banishment, to live out the rest of her days in ministry for others. In her case the days lingered into years, and the disease took a severe form, but her devotion and courage never failed. When death came to her as a friend, and her work was done, the memory of the "superior girl," who had lived among the afflicted people as a missionary rather than a patient, remained. Perhaps her fellowship in suffering gave her the final qualification to be a missionary to lepers.

India is the land which above all others cries out for lady medical missionaries; but other Eastern countries have also a claim. Wherever Islam has planted its iron heel, women are jealously guarded in harems, and it is very unusual for a man to be allowed entrance on any pretext. In China, also, women of superior class are hidden within the high walls that surround their houses. Those free to go out gain little but suffering from the barbarous attentions of native surgeons. In the East the knowledge which brings relief from pain is a power to overcome obstacles to Christianity that resist every other force.

The Church of England Zenana Missionary Society has sent out a qualified lady doctor to Foochow, and in 1894 the Church Missionary Society opened a hospital for women in Hangchow with one large and six smaller wards. One patient who was brought into this building—of which two views are given—suffering from diseased bones, has gone out to devote her recovered health and new knowledge to the service of God and her own countrywomen.

There is scarcely a mission hospital or dispensary that cannot tell of similar results of the double ministry to body and soul. Each year justifies the increased number of women with medical qualifications sent into the mission field. Some, like Mrs. Russell Watson, of the Baptist Mission at Chefu, are the wives of missionaries, others have been sent out by various missions, such as the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission, or by the women's branches (added during the close of the present century), to the more venerable societies.

Dr. Henry Martyn Clark, of Amritsar, once asked a friendly Hindu what department of foreign missions his people considered most dangerous.

"Why should I reveal our secrets to the enemy?" the Hindu responded. But he yielded to persuasion. "We do not very much fear your preaching," he said, "for we need not listen; nor your schools, for we need not send our children; nor your books, for we need not read them. But we do fear your women, for they are gaining our homes; and we very much fear your medical missions, for they are gaining our hearts. Hearts and homes gone, what shall we have left?"

What may be expected when medical and women's missions are combined? According to the friendly Hindu, the very citadels of idolatry and superstition might tremble at the advance of this double force to rescue the captives.

D. L. Woolmer.