The other remedy, or that known as the dam, is akin to what is known in Western surgery as a "moxa." A piece of cloth is rolled up in a pledget of the size of a shilling, steeped in oil, placed on the part selected by the doctor, and set alight. It burns down into the flesh, and a hard slough is formed; this gradually separates, and leaves an ulcer, which heals by degrees. This remedy is used for every conceivable illness, a particular part of the body being selected according to the disease or the diagnostic ability of the doctor who applies the remedy. Thus, in people who have suffered from indigestion you will often see a line of scars down each side of the abdomen. For neuralgia, it is applied to the temples; for headache, to the scalp; for rheumatism, to the shoulders; for lumbago, to the loins; for paralysis, to the back; for sciatica, to the thighs; and so on indefinitely. I have counted as many as fifty scars, each the size of a shilling, on one patient as the result of repeated applications of this remedy. The Afghans have extraordinary faith in both these treatments, and I have sometimes sat in a village listening to an argument in which some young fellow, lately returned from a visit to a mission hospital, recounted the wonderful things he had seen there, to which some old conservative greybeard retorted: "What do we want with all these new-fangled things? The dzan and the dam are sufficient for us." As formerly in the West, so still in Afghanistan, the village barber performs the ordinary surgical operations, such as opening an abscess or lancing a gum. The women all claim a greater or less knowledge of such surgery and medicine as they think necessary for them. After one of the village frays, when the warriors come back to their homes more or less cut and wounded, the women of the household at once set about their treatment. If there is severe hæmorrhage some oil is quickly raised to boiling-point in a saucepan, and either poured into the wound, or if, for instance, a limb has been cut off, the bloody stump is plunged into the oil. This, no doubt, acts as an effective, though somewhat barbarous, hæmostatic. If the bleeding is only slight, a certain plant gathered from the jungle is reduced to ashes, and these ashes rubbed on the wound. In the case of a clean cut the women draw out hairs from their own head, and sew it up with their ordinary sewing-needles, and I have sometimes seen flesh wounds which have been quite skilfully sewn up in this way. They are less skilful in the application of splints. In most neighbourhoods there is some village carpenter who prides himself on his skill in the application of splints to broken bones; but in most cases he bandages them too tightly, or with too little knowledge of the circulation of the limb, so that not a year passes in which we do not get one or more cases of limbs which have become gangrenous after quite simple fractures through this kind of treatment.