Measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, chickenpox, Persian children have them all. Typhoid fever, diphtheria, rheumatic fever are all common. But almost the commonest illness of all is smallpox.A woman brought a child into the dispensary waiting-room one day covered with a smallpox rash. The doctor, new to the country, ordered her out, condemning her reckless disregard for infection. “Is there anyone who has not had smallpox?” she asked, looking round at the thirty or forty other people in the room. As she expected, all had had it, and she came in.

It is considered a children’s illness, because people hardly ever grow up without having had it. In fact, their parents take care they shall not, for they are so afraid they will take it badly at an awkward time that they choose a convenient time, and either put the child with a person who has smallpox mildly, or, oftener, inoculate him with it, just as we inoculate our babies with vaccine.

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.

When you are very ill, Mother keeps you very quiet and does not let you see visitors, but when a little Persian is very ill all the neighbours crowd in to see him, and the more ill he is the more people come in. And they do not tread on tiptoe and talk in a whisper, they all talk quite loud out and smoke qalians and drink tea, and make noise enough to give anyone in good health a headache, much more a sick child.

One day I was called in to see a child who was dangerously ill. Instead of showing me into her room, the mother, together with a variety of aunts, sisters, and other relations, escorted me to their receiving-room. I asked for the sick child, and was told I should see her after tea, which meant at least half an hour’s delay. As the account they had given of her sounded very bad, I said I could not wait, that it was not our custom to think of tea-drinking and entertainment when our patients were perhaps dying. With great difficulty I managed to persuade them to take me to the poor little girl, whom they had left alone while they all came to have tea and sweets with me. She was, as they had said, very ill, her recovery was very doubtful, yet as soon as we left the room, and had sent for the medicine, they were all eager to entertain me, and I do not think anyone would have stayed with the child if I had not insisted, and they were all as gay and lively as if they had had no one dangerously ill in the next room.

The Persians are very hospitable and like to put their best before a visitor, and they consider it very necessary to provide something nice for the doctor. Some Persian doctors send word beforehand what refreshments they would like got ready.

Sometimes this deters the very poor from calling in even the mission doctor, who, they know, would treat them free. They cannot even provide tea and sugar. It was a great relief to more than one poor person, when it was discovered that the mission ladies were fond of boiled turnips, for a plate of turnips was within the reach of the poorest, costing only about a halfpenny. The news spread, and several sick people were able at once to have a doctor.

But it is in surgery that one sees the Persian doctor at his worst.

Here comes little Husain with his head plastered up with mud; on removing the mud we find a broken skull and a large wound in a foul condition. Next comes little Sakineh with both hands burnt; the burns are smeared with sticky white of egg covered over with leaves; it will take days of proper dressing to get the wounds clean. But she is not so badly off as Rubabeh, whose burn has been dressed with camphorated oil, and is so inflamed that she screams and cries the whole time.

A more fortunate child was the little girl who was scalded nearly all over, but not deeply, and who looked like a little nigger with the ink they had put on. She got well very quickly. It is like Indian ink, and seems to be the best of the remedies the Persians use for burns.

With broken bones the Persian doctors are not very successful either. Little Hasan, aged four, fell and broke both arms. The Persian doctor as usual tied them up with splints that were too small to be any real use, but he tried to make up for that by tying the bandages very tight, and poor little Hasan had both arms partly destroyed. How proud he was when, after some weeks at the C.M.S. hospital, he was able to carry an English doll clasped to his heart with the two poor bandaged stumps.

There was some truth in what one doctor said, that more than half the cases that came into the hospital had come there in consequence of the Persian doctors’ treatment. The remedy is generally worse than the disease.

There are exceptions, and I have met Persian doctors, who not only had real knowledge of medical treatment, but had some of the true doctor’s spirit of pity and self-sacrifice. Especially I would mention the brave Persian doctor who stayed at his post in Shiraz in the cholera epidemic of 1904, and fought that terrible disease instead of yielding to the panic that had seized his fellow countrymen.

It is evident, however, that there is a great and crying need for dispensaries and hospitals in Persia. So in the north the American Presbyterians, and in the south the Church Missionary Society, have founded them in a number of towns.

As a rule a dispensary is started first, to which out-patients can come to get medicines and have their hurts attended to. Later a hospital is opened. Generally the first hospital is a very poor affair, but as the work grows money is collected, and nice, clean, convenient hospitals are built and furnished. Armenian and Persian boys and girls are trained as nurses and assistants, the boys for the men’s hospital, the girls for the women’s and children’s.

Here Hasan and ‘Ali, Fatimeh and Rubabeh, and a great many other little Persian children are made as comfortable as their illness allows, and are kept clean and happy in comfortable beds, and well fed and cared for.