Part 9 (2/2)
An Indian ”Flivver.”
An ordinary road it is, and pa.s.sing over it the ordinary procession--heavy-wheeled carts drawn by humped, white bullocks; crowded jutkas whose tough, little ponies disappear in a rattle of wheels and a cloud of dust; weddings, funerals, and festivals with processions gay or mournful as the case may be. One feature alone distinguishes this road from others of its kind; once a week its dusty length is traversed by a visitant from the West, a ”Tin Lizzie,” whose unoccupied s.p.a.ces are piled high with medicine chests and instrument cases. Once a week the Doctor pa.s.ses by, and the countryside turns out to meet her.
When the Doctor Pa.s.ses by.
Where do they come from, the pathetic groups that continually bring the little Ford to a halt? For long stretches the road pa.s.ses through apparently uninhabited country, yet here they are, the lame, the halt, and the blind, as though an unseen city were pouring out the dregs of its slums. Back a mile from the road, among the tamarind trees, stands one village; at the edge of the rice fields huddles another. The roofs of thatch or earth-brown tiles seem an indistinguishable part of the landscape, but they are there, each with its quota of child-birth pain, its fever-burnings, its germ-borne epidemics where sanitation is unknown, its final pangs of dissolution. But once a week the Doctor pa.s.ses by.
What do she and her attendants treat? Sore eyes and scabies and all the dirt-carried minor ailments that infect the village; malaria from the mosquitoes that swarm among the rice fields; aching teeth to be pulled; dreaded epidemics of cholera or typhoid, small pox or plague. Now and then the back seat is cleared of its _impedimenta_ and turned into the fraction of an ambulance to convey a groaning patient to a clean bed in the hospital ward. Once at least a makes.h.i.+ft operating table has been set up under the shade of a roadside banyan tree, and the Scriptural injunction, ”If thy foot offend thee, cut it off,” carried out then and there to the saving of a life.
At dark the plucky little Ford plods gallantly back to the home base, its occupants with faded garlands, whose make-up varies with the seasons--yellow chrysanthemums with purple everlasting ta.s.sels at Christmas time; in the dry, hot days of spring pink and white oleanders from the water channels among the hills; during the rains the heavy fragrance of jasmine. All the flowers do their brave best for the day when the Doctor pa.s.ses by.
Where no Doctor Pa.s.ses by.
But what of the roads on which the Doctor never pa.s.ses? From Vellore's fortress-crowned hills they stretch north and south, east and west, and toward all the intermediate points of the compa.s.s. Every city of India forms such a nucleus for the country around. Amid the wheat fields of the Punjab, under the tamarinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus pools and bamboo cl.u.s.ters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black cotton fields of the Deccan are the roads and the villages, the villages and the roads. Some mathematically minded writer once computed that, if Christ in the days of His flesh had started on a tour among the villages of India, visiting one each day, to-day in the advancing years of the twentieth century many would yet be waiting, unenlightened and unvisited. Few have been visited by any modern follower of the Great Physician. Who can compute their sum total of human misery, of preventable disease, of undernourishment, of pain that might all too easily he alleviated?
[Ill.u.s.tration: Kamala (Lotus Flower), Winner of The Gold Medal in Anatomy in Vellore Medical School]
[Ill.u.s.tration: A Little Lost One--What Will Such Girls Do for India?
CONTRASTS]
A Problem In Multiplication.
Was it, one wonders, the memory of the Gudiyattam road, and those like it in nameless thousands, that burned deep into Dr. Ida Scudder's heart and brain the desire to found a Medical School, where the American Doctor might multiply herself and reproduce her life of skillful and devoted service in the lives of hundreds of Indian women physicians? It is the only way that the message of the Good Physician, His healing for soul and body, may penetrate those village fastnesses of dirt, disease, and ignorance. One hundred and sixty women doctors at present try to minister to India's one hundred and sixty millions of women, shut out by immemorial custom from men's hospitals and from physicians who are men.
”What are these among so many?” What can they ever be except as they may multiply themselves in the persons of Indian messengers of healing?
Small Beginnings.
And so, in July, 1918, the Vellore Medical School was opened, under the fostering care of four contributing Mission Boards, and with the approval and aid of the Government of Madras. ”Go ahead if you can find six students who have completed the High School Course,” said the interested Surgeon General. Instead of six, sixty-nine applied; seventeen were accepted; and fourteen not only survived the inevitable weeding out process, but brought to the school at the end of the first year the unheard of distinction of one hundred per cent, of pa.s.ses in the Government examination. That famous first cla.s.s is now in its Senior Year, and by the time this book comes from the press will be scattering itself among thirteen centres of help and health.
And so, in rented buildings, the Medical School started life. If ever an inst.i.tution pa.s.sed its first year in a hand-to-mouth existence, this one has. Short of funds save as mercifully provided by private means; short of doctors for the staff; short of buildings in which to house its increasing student body, for it has grown from fourteen to sixty-seven; short, in fine, of everything needed except faith and enthusiasm and hard work on the part of its founders, it has yet gone on; the girls have been housed, cla.s.ses have been taught, examinations pa.s.sed, and the first cla.s.s is ready to go out into the world of work.
Just here perhaps one brief explanation should be made. These girls will not be _doctors_ in the narrowly technical sense, for the Government of India reserves the doctor's degree for such students as have first taken a college diploma and then on top of it a still more demanding medical course of five years. These students will receive the degree of Licensed Medical Pract.i.tioner (L.M.P.) which authorizes them to practise medicine and surgery and even to be in charge of a hospital. The full college may come, we hope, not many years hence, when funds become available.
Meantime, this school will year by year be turning out its quota of medical workers whose usefulness cannot be over-estimated.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIRST BUILDING AT NEW MEDICAL SCHOOL, VELLORE, WHICH IS HOUSING OUR STUDENTS]
A Visit to Vellore.
Let us pay a visit to the School and see it as it is in its present state of makes.h.i.+ft. Since its beginning it has dwelt, like Paul the prisoner, ”in its own hired house,” but Paul's epistles tell of no such uncertainty in his tenure of his rented dwelling, as that which has afflicted this inst.i.tution. The housing shortage which has distressed New York has reached even to Vellore. Two rented bungalows were lost, and, as an emergency measure, the future Nurses' Home was erected in great haste on the town site and at once utilized as a dormitory with some rooms set aside for lectures as well.
Corpses--and Children.
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