At the Court of the Amîr: A NarrativeGray, John Alfred
History
At the Court of the Amîr: A Narrative
Gray, John Alfred
'Abd al-Rahman Khan, Amir of Afghanistan, -1901; Afghanistan -- History
One morning soon after our arrival in Kabul, when I was at the Erg
hospital, a messenger arrived in a great hurry to say a man had been
injured at the Workshops. I jumped on my horse, which was waiting, and
galloped off. Just outside the Workshop garden, on the road by the
river bank, I saw the heavy portable engine with a crowd of people
round it. Mr. Pyne was there in the middle of the crowd, and a man, one
of the Afghan workmen, was lying on the ground. I examined the patient
and found he was dead. Mr. Pyne was very upset and at first refused
to believe it. He sent off a man to the shops for whisky, and begged
me to send someone to the hospital for ammonia. I did so, though, of
course, it was useless. They were moving the engine to the Salaam Khana
or Durbar Hall to work the dynamo for the electric light there, but no
one in the crowd seemed to have seen how the accident occurred, whether
the man was crushed under the wheel or whether he had been struck on
the head. There was no inquest, and post mortem examinations were not
viewed with favour.
Later on, when the machinery was put together and some of it was in
working order, accidents and deaths were, as might be expected, of
frequent occurrence. In stepping over the shafting which ran across the
entrance to one of the shops, about a foot above the ground, the long
sheepskin postîn or coat would catch, and the wearer be whirled round
and killed. Familiarity breeds contempt, and in spite of accidents it
took a long time to educate the ordinary Afghan, after he had got over
his first awe, up to the point of learning that machinery in motion
should be approached with circumspection.
They had a way of putting their fingers under the punches of the
cartridge machines, forgetting that the punch would inevitably come
down at its appointed moment. It took one man in the palm, I remember,
and I had to amputate his first and second finger and his thumb.
Another got his hand between some steel rollers in motion, and but for
the fact that Mr. Pyne was on the spot and at once threw the machine
out of gear, the arm would have gone too. As it was, the skin was taken
neatly and cleanly from the wrist and turned backwards like a glove
over the finger tips. The bones of the hand were crushed, and I wished
to amputate in the lower forearm; but the man, who was brought to the
hospital, refused to have the hand taken off because he could move the
fingers a little. I pointed out the danger he was running of further
serious results, but he would not consent.
As he refused the only treatment that I felt was suitable, I could not
undertake to treat him, and he was removed to his home in the city.
I do not know who attended to his hurts, probably one of the native
“dressers,” but four or five days afterwards he sent a friend to beg
that I would come and remove the hand. Unfortunately, it was too late;
“tetanus,” or lockjaw, had set in.
[Sidenote: Afghan Treatment of Dislocations.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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