In the last two years China has surprised the world by carrying out her agreement to extirpate quickly opium smoking and poppy growing. It is the most spectacular abatement of a gigantic nuisance that the world has known. Among the heroes of the reform was Lin Ping Chang, a grandson of the famous Commissioner Lin who destroyed the chests of opium at Canton and brought on the war with Britain in 1840. Heredity obtains in China! It would have taken England and America possibly fifty years to bring about an equal reform in personal habits, but the Chinese have for 3,500 years been the most obedient people to government in the world, “Filial Piety” being the eminent principle of the religious, social and political life. The good work is going on apace, and Hongkong and India, thanks to the noble altruism of Lord Morley, Sir E. Grey, Mr. Asquith and Lloyd George, are with good grace swallowing the bitter pill of loss of revenue from this lucrative trade. It was a great victory for religion over commerce, and the latter died hard, for unregulated commerce is anything but a moralist at heart. The humanitarian sentiment in Britain, America and China won over money. Britain in her parliament Blue Books used to say: “Opium is a legitimate article of trade and a vested right that China is unable to attack.” To-day John Morley speaks of Britain’s “humanitarian duty.” Persian opium, which is much denser in morphia than is the Indian, still comes to Hongkong for Formosa. This is the opium of which Herodotus in 430 B.C. amusingly wrote as follows, his imagination supplying his facts: “Though it comes from a most stinking place, it is itself most fragrant. It is found sticking like gum to the beards of he-goats, which collect it from the woods.”

Now Japan should obey the humanitarian sentiment of the world, and stamp out opium in her Formosan colony. The opium conferences at Shanghai in 1909 and the Hague in 1911, called by America and presided over by the American, Bishop Brent, have produced wonderful results. It now remains for the western nations to emulate China’s example and stamp out morphia. China could well come back at America and say: “What are you going to do about morphine and hypodermic syringes? You import yearly 500,000 pounds of opium, and you use only 70,000 pounds in medicine. As far as morphine goes you are more ‘doped’ than all the nations combined. You import 200,000 ounces of cocaine each year, of which only 15,000 ounces are used in medicine.” The exportation of India opium will cease in 1918, and China will have ceased to grow the poppy this year. In the heat of the debates in England, Eric Lewis, a Welsh supporter of Lloyd George’s, proposed that England should buy all the opium in India, like the famous Chinese Commissioner Lin of Canton, dump it in the sea, and indemnify by a loan of $40,000,000 the poppy growers of Bengal. Now let us cease to criticize Britain, for if she grossly sinned, she has repented and made amends, as could now be expected of a Britain which has recently established national pensions for her aged, and brought her educational extension, employers’ liability and land taxation up to the mark set by America.

So thoroughly successful was the Chinese government in restricting the planting of the poppy even in distant Yunnan province, that in 1911 the passenger earnings of the new French railway from Haiphong to Yunnan were greater, because men fed on maize, instead of diseased by opium, are both strong and wealthy enough to travel. Maize succeeded the poppy. When China was attacking the use of opium in the mandarinate, one official wrote to the Board of Constitutional Reform: “His Majesty can send me the silver cord (for suicide by strangulation) but I can not give up opium.” They did give it up, for an opium smoker was denied his right to plead in court, and his office was taken from him. At plowing time, revenue officers were sent into Yunnan, Szechuen and other poppy provinces, to see that poppy seed was not sown. The opium cure, which is either swallowed or administered hypodermically, is given the patient at the same time the drug is, and if his stomach only was concerned, he is so nauseated that in five days he will give up the indulgence. The cure contains fifteen per cent. tincture belladona, fluid extract of prickly ash (xanthoxylum), and fluid extract of hyoscyamus. Another cure includes iron, coffee, quinine, strychnine, gentian and capsicum, with temporary injections of morphine in cases of collapse. In a former book, The Chinese, I affirmed that China and India could soon economically recover from the prohibition of opium planting if the same attention were directed to other fields. I shall instance Yunnan alone. In the first year of the prohibition the province suffered. In 1910 and 1911 the increase in silver, copper and tin mining, and maize cultivation had alone reimbursed Yunnan for all her loss of opium revenues, and a sobered people realized that they were even then only beginning to find their energies for legitimate enrichment. The burning of pipes continues in China. In The Chinese I related some dramatic occurrences in Shanghai. In September, 1911, Chinese gathered on the athletic field of the Tientsin Y.M.C.A. and burned 100,000 opium pipes, and at Yunnan City, under the auspices of Governor Li Chin Hsi, a great burning was held on the parade ground of the arsenal; the new military, the police and bands attending to add Éclat to the function.

Doctor Buchanan, of India, has discovered that cats are immune to China’s curse, bubonic plague, and that they can safely destroy the rats which carry the germs. But cats and dogs indulge in fleas, and the flea is as busy in transporting the plague germ as are the rats. Poison and traps are the things to use against rats, and cats and dogs should be asked to retire, too, until China cleans herself up a bit, when she can probably safely indulge in bench shows of her famous chow and Pekingese dogs! Even the fur marmot has been asked to go, since the pneumonic plague epidemic in Manchuria in the winter of 1910. That awful epidemic revealed a new scourge, even worse than bubonic, to the startled world. Bubonic thrives in dampness in the south in summer time. Pneumonic thrives in indoor winter conditions. America was represented on the field by Doctor R.P. Strong, of Manila, Doctors Aspland and Stenhouse, and the medical missionaries Sinclair, Gibb and Mary Ogden; Japan by Doctor Kitasato, who discovered the bubonic bacillus at Hongkong in 1894; Russia by Doctor Haffkine and Doctor Zabolothy; China by Doctor Wu Lien Teh; England by Doctor A.F. Jackson, who fell a martyr, to the great grief of all China; Scotland by Doctor Ross, of Mukden. Though no victim recovers, the germ can not live outside in dry air. The doctors and sanitary corps, inoculated with Yersin serum, or Haffkine’s or Kitasato’s prophylactic lymph, at once equipped themselves with masks and surtouts, and the scene was one which Manzoni might have novelized. Often dying men were seen to struggle up to the pile of bodies among which were their fathers, bow low in filial, Confucian ancestor worship, even to pour out libations and present sacrifice, and then join the heap in a delirious death agony. Such a tragic attitude could be possible only in a land of ancestor worship.

Kingslake, in Eothen, describes the quarantined city of Cairo in 1835, when a thousand deaths a day occurred until the terrorized population hated the name death, and called it with bated breath “another accident”. I have been through similar nerve-racking experiences in the plague centers of China, the mentioning of death and cemeteries being tabooed from polite conversation, though hundreds were falling. Kingslake’s description is graphic. He went to the only European physician in the city, and found him wrapped up, suffering from the plague. The heroic man prescribed for Kingslake. Later, thinking that he might have recovered, Kingslake sent his servant to ask the physician to call. “Did you meet him?” The servant replied: “Yes, I met him coming out of his house,—on his bier!” In the tenth chapter of Eothen, Kingslake recites how the plague in 1835 ruthlessly struck down the brave brothers of the Franciscan monastery in holy Jerusalem. One quarantined member went on his priestly duty to the stricken city. On his return to the pest-house, he rang a bell as a signal that he still lived, and was carrying on the martyr’s work over the paths that Christ himself trod. When the bell ceased ringing, a new brother went forth to bury the martyr, and take up his duties which could only also lead to death.

In 1720, Belsunce, the hero Bishop of Marseilles, seemed alone to breathe pure air and handle pure food as he moved among the infected who to the number of 50,000 dropped at his feet. Infection comes from indoor breathing, direct, or from sputum. Banish dirt, darkness and foul air, and both bubonics at once commit suicide or die of starvation. The pneumonic, it will be recalled, swept from Harbin to Newchwang, and held Europe in terror that it would take the Siberian goods train westward for St. Petersburg and Berlin. Thirty European doctors and nurses were martyrs, most of them Russians. The Chinese permitted what they have never permitted before, the cremation of the dead, and the segregation of suspects in detention camps. At Harbin alone there were 1,200 deaths, the dead being cremated in the brick kilns. If heroic members of any legation staff should be given honors for the Peking campaign against plague in 1911, there are 20,000 veterans of Hongkong and South China who should be clothed in a coat of medals for plague dangers they never thought of talking about, except to say with their guest Kipling that “it was all in the day’s work”. I have seen the foreign police, soldiers, sanitary corps and volunteers of Hongkong and Canton tackle multitudinous dangers in epidemics with all the Éclat of a football game, and the men of Bombay regularly do the same thing. Because of the legations and press bureaus, the foreigner in North China, God bless him, is much better advertised than is the foreigner of South China and India. India had one Kipling; South China is looking for hers!

In a former volume I have instanced some surprising appearances of bubonic plague in Europe. In September, 1910, a girl, her father, mother and nurse, died successively under mysterious conditions at Preston, Suffolk, England. It was later noticed that the rats in the neighborhood were dying. Examination showed that the black plague was the cause, and the supposition is that the disease was imported in grain received from Odessa, Russia, and that the germs developed under conditions of damp, dirt and darkness. In 1902, Odessa, Russia, reported a plague case in the house of a baker. In August, 1910, plague was recrudescent there in the very same house, showing that the bubonic plague germs had lived eight years. The ineffective measures of the authorities to destroy the rats caused the spread of the last-mentioned epidemic. World campaigns against rats will doubtless now occur from time to time, as insurance companies have taken up the study of the subject.

Abattoir and market laws calling for foreign supervision and veterinary inspection were first instituted by Hongkong, and Singapore, Shanghai, Tientsin, Saigon, Manila, and Tsingtau followed in about the order named. Partial inspection is exercised at Canton, Hankau, Newchwang, Peking and other cities. It is one of the things China must and will soon take hold of, for Sun Yat Sen (Sunyacius) who has done so much for Chinese reform, is himself a modern physician and has always lived in foreign or treaty ports. In connection with this, China will improve her cattle, which are of the wild, buffalo-humped variety, with an excess of bone. Her Hankau and Manchurian black, as well as the Kwangtung white, pigs are now going to Liverpool, London, Glasgow and Bremen. It is wonderful that populous China can be an exporter of meat to Europe. It shows two things: that living in America and Europe is too high, and that return freights are too low. China centuries ago instituted pure food laws, preceding Germany, Britain and America. They did not go far of course, but they showed the germinative idea. The guild or manufacturer was glad to stamp biscuit or ink-stick, and the food purveyor placed a red stamp on his dried duck, fish, or vermicelli package, the stamp standing for purity or inferiority according to the reputation of the packer. Every reader has sympathized with the heroic General Roberts who in his book, Forty-One Years in India, tells of a sunstroke which he suffered in the heat of the tropics. The great heat and humidity are likely to produce, certainly in those who use stimulants, drugs or much meat, anaemia or acidulation of the blood, with persistent auto-intoxication, and the resulting torture of constantly reeling under the heat can be imagined. The Chinese are up at daylight, and most active in the cooler part of the day. The Chinese skull, because of the lifelong habit of shaving the head under the Manchu rÉgime, grows thicker than the European’s skull, and the former, therefore, are better able to resist the equatorial sun. Herodotus pointed out that the ancient Egyptians, for the same reason, resisted the sun better than the Persians, who accustomed themselves to head-coverings from childhood. The Chinese emperor and the mandarins gave their audiences at dawn. It will be recalled that Cicero, when governor of Asiatic Cicilia, admitted the crowds of complainants to his popular court at daylight, so as to use the hot midday for retirement from the heat. At Hongkong, where, hot as it is, exercise is imperative, we used to rise at daylight and rush to the golf, tennis and riding courses for an hour’s play, and this unusual sight would induce you to say that it was not so luxurious a colony as the sumptuous club life of the later day would possibly make it appear to be.

The bar in an Oriental club is eloquent of the fact that you are in the malarial East, for among the popular bottles is the one containing quinine-sulphate powder, and the veterans seem able to judge what is a proper dose to take out with a spoon to mix with their sherry as they salute and say: “Here’s how,” or “The king.”

South China is kind to the man who suffers from heat. Knowing that he is coolest who can throw away his flesh and move in his bare bones, she provides a damp hot climate that reduces men to the appearance of trained thoroughbreds! There they walk, the thinnest foreigners of the Far East, the Hongkong, Manila, Saigon, Shanghai and Canton men! They have been boiled down almost to their backbones and skulls from March until November, and there being no tissue to feed, the blood can all go to building up the gray matter! Although black focuses the actinic rays of the overhead equatorial sun, and a body feels twenty degrees more of heat than when covered with white, the British courts of Hongkong insist on the formal garb of Lincoln’s Inn, a black coat and gown. Pity the barristers and judges of Hongkong who delve into the law and weigh out justice in the stifling atmosphere of the magnificent courts of the illustrious Crown colony. The almost naked, or duck-covered criminal, bracing up for his sentence, shows fewer beads on his perspiring brow than do his learned accusers! “Inflexible” is not a more famous name in the British navy than in the British legal and colonial service.

The Americans in Manila, the French in Saigon, and the republican Chinese, however, are listening to the dictates of hygiene rather than to the long sonorous trump of tradition. In the American cavalry in the tropics it is found that the imported white animals are immune to the heat, whereas the darker breeds soon die. Southern Tibet is coming nearer to the railhead with its wonderful climate for the enervated of the whole East. India, Tonquin and China are sending on their construction gangs, and the day is not so far off when the veil at the 8,000 feet passes, which has hid the last withheld land, will be rent in twain. The two men who have done the most to break down the forts of exclusion are Sir Francis, Colonel Younghusband, for the Indian government, and the Chinese general, Chao Ehr Feng, who in 1910 also broke up the Buddhist superstitious system by driving the Dalai Lama (their pope) for the first time into unholy foreign soil at Darjeeling. Twenty miles south of Chungking, in the sublime valley of Wen Tang, is a famous hot sulphur bath cut in the rock. The flow is generous, and the Buddhist priests have divided the bath so that men and women may use it. They make no charge for the use of the water, but they charge for inn service. Before many years many foreigners will resort here, as the bathing is beautifully clean.

A remarkable thing about China is the comparative absence of flies, because manure and refuse is so important as a fertilizer that it is immediately carried to the intensively farmed fields, which are expected to produce two to three harvests a year. Therefore typhoid and other diseases are not as prevalent as they otherwise would be. However, a whisper in your ear, reader: if China lacks in flies, she abounds in “bunkies,” which is the polite name for fleas! Nature abhors a vacuum and always provides for the deficiency in one field from the surplus in another! To have real safety in a Chinese inn, one needs to go to bed in a Peary suit, furnished with a diver’s helmet. This is never done, however, because of the heat. Cold weather only increases the torture, for the pauper “bunkie,” small as he is, successfully races to the heated kang faster than the paying guest! As the Chinese masses use no liquor, tobacco or drugs, and live an outdoor life on vegetable food mainly, their hearts are in splendid condition, and all the hospital surgeons report remarkable recoveries when an accident has made operations necessary. The race seems to have that old aboriginal fortitude of not fearing the knife or wincing under pain. They have no idea of the danger of infection by contact, the rich being as ill-informed as the poor. Wet towels, wrung out in the same hot water, are for refreshment rubbed over the hands, face and neck of every one at a feast. A governor’s pipe is first lighted and puffed for him by a miserable attendant, the governor merely wiping the mouthpiece dry with his hand or long sleeve, the custom being to cut out a soiled sleeve and substitute a new sleeve so as to save the splendid garment.

The Chinese are proving themselves to be adept in dental surgery. Many Chinese have graduated from the University of Pennsylvania dental school, and they have set up in business throughout the Chinese treaty ports. Others have graduated from Hongkong’s school, and still others, entering as apprentices under Chinese dentists, trained abroad, soon start out for themselves and pass the good work along. When customers are slow in coming, the Chinese dentist adds another shingle to his door. “Dentist and Photographer”; “Dentist and Printer”; “Dentist and Manufacturers’ Agent,” are common signs. A good many stories are printed that the old-fashioned Oriental dentist trained himself for tooth pulling by practising with his fingers on pulling pegs from soft and afterward from hardwood logs, but this is true only as far as loosened teeth are concerned. They always used forceps of some kind. Generals Roberts and Kitchener could not, by taking thought, add one cubit unto the stature of the British soldier, but they decreed that he must have as good teeth as he had a rifle when on foreign service, and so the dentists of Hongkong and other garrison ports flourish. The British call themselves “dental surgeons.” The Chinese put out a sign that they repair or extract molars “by best American methods.” The Philadelphia dentist, here as over the world, leads in his calling. One owns a leading newspaper of Hongkong. The prices of the American dentist are high, as the tourist and five-year indentured clerk discover. Apprentices are brought out under contract covering service, and it is rumored that some contracts prohibit independent practise in the same port at the end of the term; but common law has long ago exploded the legality of a man signing away his rights to make a living.

It is strongly hoped that a cure has now been found for incipient tubercular leprosy, hitherto supposed to be incurable. South China has more lepers than any country, and the necessary segregation is incomplete. Doctor J.T. Wayson, city physician of Honolulu, has used the “beauty pencil” (stick of carbon dioxide ice), which gives a temperature of one hundred degrees below zero, on the nodule sores, breaking down the affected tissues time after time, until no “bacilli leprae” are found in the tests of the cuttings from the surrounding parts. He has found that affected children of lepers seem to have been cured. The trial of this method will be made in the missionary and University of Pennsylvania hospitals at Canton, which is the center of the largest leprous district in the world, though it has had no Robert Louis Stevenson or Father Damien eloquently to make its wants known, as was done for the Molokai colony in Hawaii. If there is some unknown microbic diathesis or nervous tendency to it, this remedy, like quinine, strychnine, phosphate of iron, chaulmoogra oil, etc., may not be a permanent success. Long years of observation only can tell. I have gone through the leper camps and the leper boat colonies of the Heungshan Peninsula between Canton and Macao. The colonies do not seem to move up or down in numbers. There seems to be no danger of infection if the visitor does not eat or handle things among them. As I have related in The Chinese, the scenes are piteous beyond words, and illustrate China’s old Spartan methods, that the sooner incompetents pass away the better for all. It is said that a fish diet encourages the diathesis, and certainly Heungshan is a remarkable fish center. Doctor G.A. Hansen, of Bergen, a Norwegian bacteriologist, and Doctors Brinckerhoff, Cumy and Hallman, of Honolulu, all discovered the leprosy bacillus, and Doctor Hansen broke down the belief that the disease was hereditary. By segregation, he reduced Norway’s cases from three thousand to four hundred. The American bacteriologists are experimenting on toxins. In 1902 an American named Conrardy established and lived in a model endowed lazaretto with five hundred lepers near Canton. He, of course, contracted the disease, which made slow headway because of his vitality, which was stronger than that of the vegetable-fed Chinese. He expected to live for fifteen years, but at the end of eight years he was slowly sinking. On beautiful Joao Island, which is in view from your hotel window at Macao, South China, Portugal long ago established a leper asylum.

A careful study of the newspapers for many years must lead one to the deduction that as the Chinese adopt foreign life in the treaty ports, suicides are increasing among married women and business men. Probably both religion and nerves are at fault, for they go somewhat together. As is well known, Chinese cities and dwelling-compounds are surrounded by walls. Unusual rains or quickly melting snows often undermine the walls of compounds, filling the street with dÉbris. In August, 1911, at Mukden, Manchuria, particularly, the streets looked as though the Russians and Japanese had again just got through with bombarding the town! How differently everything is done in China and the Occident! The New Jersey cities are spending some $10,000,000 to take liquid sewage from their rivers and conduct it in a trunk sewer to New York Bay. In China so little sewage remains after the farmer is through with its manuring properties that British analysts concluded to take the water supply for the three cities of Hankau, Hanyang and Wuchang, in the center of populous China, directly from the Han River near the cities. The extensive plant consists of a deep intake protected from the heavy loess siltage; an air lift, which showers the water in rain into filter beds; reservoirs of five million gallons; three Worthington pumps of 300,000 gallons an hour and an electric plant to supply the cities. The company is Chinese, and Chinese did all the contracting by the favorite method of piecework. As the provincial parliament was not established when the company was chartered, the viceroy granted the franchise. American boilers were used.

Water gathering is easy in Hongkong, though it has no river. Many mountains of the island have been reserved and trenched at the bottom. The torrential rains strike these peaks, and a thousand trenches carry the water to dammed valleys at Taitam, Pokfulum and Wong Nei Chong, high enough up in the hills to give gravity pressure for the mains. The beautiful aqueducts on Bowen Road, far up on the mountain side, facing the famous harbor, are a sight no tourist approaching on his steamer will forget. When pianos are made for the humid south, loose keys and felt, fastened without gum, must be provided for, and even at that lamps are kept burning under the instrument to dry the atmosphere. A case of the Korean “earth disease,” or “tochil,” is rare in America, owing to the vigilance of our Marine Hospital Service, but one case got into Seattle from the Orient in September, 1910. The disease is incurable and infectious, and is much dreaded. Other races may have forgotten, but the Orient never forgets, and always can bring up something wonderful from the dispersion of Babel, and every camp gathering since, along the valley of the Tarim!

An account of the quarantine practise at Hongkong and other Oriental tropical ports may be of interest. Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Shanghai or Nagasaki may hear or believe that there is plague or cholera at Hongkong, and they quarantine vessels from the latter port. There is always certain feeling between the port doctors, and Hongkong retaliates. A vessel loaded with steerage and cabin passengers arrives at Hongkong from one of these other ports. The yellow flag is hoisted on the main topmast and no one is allowed to board the ship, which lies in the stream, until the port doctor and his assistants come off in a launch, which flies a yellow flag, and allows the ship’s yellow flag to be hauled down. Quartermasters man the gangway and rail until the doctor frees the vessel. He holds a conference with the ship’s doctor, and woe betide the latter’s vessel, or its future calls up and down the coast, if untruths are told or concealments made. The cabin passengers are carefully watched as they march by the cabin table, and the temperature of suspicious cases is taken. Any one who shows over ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit is examined further for corroborative symptoms. The temperature of every one of the steerage is taken and the glass thermometer is not always cleaned as it is passed from mouth to mouth here in these crowded regions! A suspicious case is stripped of clothes then and there in the line. Despite satisfactory examinations, vessels are sometimes held up forty-eight hours, and every one in the steerage, as well as his baggage and quarters, is sulphur-smoked, steamed and washed. A fumigation hulk is used for this purpose, and it is the most hated vessel anchored in the harbor. I have known a ship’s white officers, afflicted with plague, cholera, etc., to be taken off to the plague hulk Hygeia, and their vessels to be detained fourteen days for observation and cleansing before being released by the British and American doctors of the port. The detention anchorage ranges on the northwest of the usual fairway, and though a beautiful spot under the heathen hills of old China, it is naturally considered by many as a most melancholy one.

There is always a smouldering fire of conflict burning in the hearts of ships’ agents, port doctors and United States Marine hospital surgeons on duty abroad. The agents are inclined to imperfect care and quicker despatch of vessels. The United States doctors who, abroad, splendidly and incorruptibly guard the health of America, are likely to injure competitive business for the sake of making safety doubly sure. The proper course is “in medio tutissimus ibis.” I have known these doctors to examine the earth around lily roots and prohibit their export to America during many months of the year. Ships’ captains, doctors and agents, ever pressed by the management for increased earnings, take every bit of risk they can, even in the case of west-bound Chinese suffering from phthisis, and the check of the United States Marine Hospital Service is salutary, and will continue to be necessary. When a vessel is homeward bound the United States Marine doctor at Hongkong will not give a clean bill of health for America until all steerage passengers and their effects have been washed and steamed in disinfecting waters. Often the emigrants are stripped and America thus saved from loathsome hidden diseases being imported. The scene is sometimes enough to make the doctors as sagacious as Solomon, or as compassionate as Florence Nightingale. What a work is opening up in China for the labors of the medical missionary, first with the touch and then with the voice of the Angel of Salvation. The rigid medical examination of returning Chinese at Hongkong and San Francisco is disliked by Chinese consuls, firms and the steerage passengers themselves, but the best friend of China, if he is enlightened as to the unsanitary conditions yet obtaining there, could not ask America to lighten her severity, which is no more onerous than Japan’s, until China cleans up her land, sanitizes her houses, and supplies herself with a modern medical system. The inspection at San Francisco sometimes calls for lancing of the ear at night to see if the patient is suffering from filariasis, and at Hongkong and sometimes at San Francisco the immigrant is required to disrobe, bathe and have his effects fumigated. The Hongkong inspection can not obviate the wisdom of a new inspection at San Francisco to ward against hookworm, elephantiasis, plague, cholera and the unmentionable disease.

Hongkong is ever increasing its hospital equipment, which is now the most extensive in the Far East. Some of the buildings erected on the mountain peaks are palatial. On the western slope of Victoria Mount there is the worldwide known Tung Wah Hospital, managed by Chinese educated in the medical schools of Britain, America and Hongkong. At this hospital Doctor Sun Yat Sen, the first president of China, was a student some years ago. Over Bowen Road, above the clouds of Mount Wanchai, is the sumptuous Military Hospital, and at the foot of the mountain is the no less splendid Naval Hospital. On Mount Kellett is Sharp’s Hospital, and on Victoria Peak is the Peak Hospital. There is the Civil Hospital, the Nethersole Hospital, hospitals over on the mainland at Kowloon, and there will be a railroad hospital at Kowloon. Canton has copied from Hongkong. The Chinese there are modernizing their ancient guild hospitals which lie outside of the eastern wall. Philanthropy in only the smallest of the Hongkong hospitals has been depended upon, most of them being municipal or service hospitals. At Canton is the immense Doctor Peter Parker Hospital, founded in 1835, for which the American Presbyterian women of Philadelphia furnish the medical missionaries. There are 300 beds, and 25,000 patients are treated annually. The Chinese do their part, having presented a building for a medical college. The Gregg Hospitals for Women at Canton is presided over by Doctors Mary Fulton and Mary Niles, and the Chinese have given $3,500 for a children’s ward. At Kowkiang, on the Yangtze, there is the model Danforth Memorial Hospital, erected with American money and presided over by a noted Chinese lady physician who has taken the name of Miss Mary Stone, and who graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School.

In remote large Hainan Island, in Suchow, at Paoting, Chingtu, Peking, etc., there are American Presbyterian hospitals. Where there are now hundreds there will soon be thousands of medical missionaries and more medical colleges to fit the Chinese to help themselves. It is the most important work in China,—more important even than foreign loans for railways and industrials, and far more important than loans for armies and navies. Doctor F.C. Yen, of Yale Medical College, Changsha, is a fine example of a native medical man, trained in the best that the West knows. Several American universities have opened medical schools in China, the University of Pennsylvania at Canton, Yale at Changsha in stern conservative Hunan province; and now Harvard proposes to open a medical school possibly at Shanghai, to be staffed by the Harvard Medical School, and the diseases which they will attack are China’s curses, the dangers of the world,—the skin diseases, tumors, the two plagues, cholera, dysentery, leprosy, malaria and consumption. One-third of the money for the Scotch Presbyterian Hospital and medical college at Mukden was contributed by the Chinese, who now warmly appreciate Western medicine.

The day is not distant when the Chinese, placed on their feet in finance, will pay half the expense of medical missions. The Chinese give liquorice to men and animals as a cure for wasting diseases. From the skin of a venomous toad their doctors derive a preparation which they call Sen-so. It is a far more powerful stimulus to heart action than our drug digitalis. It is well known that deer’s horns are ground to powder by the old-fashioned Chinese doctors. In the valley of the Wei River, just north of the Peling range in far western Kansu province, stags are raised in enclosures for this purpose. The soft prongs of the horn are cut off in summer time. The old-fashioned doctors of China never dissected, as abuse of the body is contrary to Confucianism. They knew nothing of circulation, and little of anatomy, physiology or chemistry. “Then Confucianism must go,” say the new Chinese scientists. Two of their medical proverbs are:

“A physician may cure every disease except the disease of Fate.”

“Send for the diagnostician before the druggist, for the cure must fit the disease.”

Four great tropical medicine colleges have been opened outside of the Orient. The first was the University of Liverpool School. Then followed the London School of Tropical Medicine, and the Hamburg School of the Germans. Now the New York Tropical Medical School has been opened at Twentieth Street and Second Avenue. The work will include the translation of text-books, and America will be able to do much for Southern China in the clinic on ships which the school will have as soon as the Panama Canal is open. Serums have yet to be found for the paralyzing dengue which every foreigner in China has suffered from at one time or another: typhus, anÆmia, dum-dum, tze-tze, sleeping sickness, amoebic dysentery, malaria and pneumonic plague, though the indefatigable Doctor Kitasato found a temporary serum for the last named.

The medical works translated into Chinese by medical missionaries include the following: Doctor J.G. Kerr’s (first teacher of Doctor Sunyacius) translation of Bartholow’s Practise of Medicine, Doctor S.A. Hunter’s translation of a Materia Medica and Pharmacopoeia, Doctor Dudgeon’s translation of Gray’s Anatomy, Doctor Porter’s translation of a physiology, Doctor Mary Fulton’s Diseases of Children; Nursing in Surgery, and Gynecology, etc.

When I think of the trials of the Orient in its heated, humid, equatorial region, where I lived for three years; and the hardships, dangers and life-remembered punishment of its unavoidable, various diseases, I am inclined to suggest in this book the formation of an “Equator Club,” eligibility for membership in which shall be at least two years’ uninterrupted residence between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Such an experience was certainly a unique and trying one, a tremendous test of physique, as a growing number, who have endured it, will confess, and a perpetuated remembrance of those days, and an interest in the successors who have followed one to take up the white man’s growing burdens in those realms of the imperious sun, would certainly do good.