The “dressers” of wounds in Afghanistan are a body of men--natives--whose duty it is to dress wounds and ulcers, set broken limbs, and probe for bullets. They have no knowledge of even the groundwork of their profession. Never having dissected, nor studied anatomy, they are quite ignorant of the position and shape of the bones, to say nothing of the course and distribution of the larger arteries of the human body, so that the abscess knife and the scalpel put into the hands of one of these men work grievous harm. They carry about with them a flat tin box, with partitions inside, something like a paint box; and in it is a collection of most filthy looking ointments of different colours. These they plaster on indiscriminately; if one does not cure an ulcer perhaps another will. For dislocation of joints a mixture of flour and yolk of eggs smeared on is a certain specific; they have no idea of reducing the dislocation. For a broken bone, flour and yolk of eggs again comes in. Say the bone of one arm is broken between the shoulder and elbow, the following treatment is adopted. Some narrow strips of calico, smeared with the flour and egg mixture, are bound tightly round the limb at the seat of injury; thus breaking the first law of surgery, that no bandage be put on under a splint. Over this bandage are arranged longitudinally four or five narrow pieces of wood about five inches long, very like those you buy in a bundle for firewood, and utterly useless as splints, and another bandage is wound firmly over these; there is no padding with cotton wool. The patient is then left. The result is, of course, that the limb below the bandages becomes exceedingly swollen and painful. When the pain has reached such a pitch that it is no longer bearable, the patient releases his arm from the bandages, and the dresser is sent for to readjust them, so that the unfortunate limb is relieved for a time before it is tortured afresh. In spite of the dresser the bone sometimes unites, usually at a more or less obtuse angle; but not uncommonly, especially in compound or comminuted fractures, the pressure is taken off too late, and the whole limb mortifies. The patient, after months of suffering, may or may not recover. I have had them brought to me with the broken end of the bone protruding from a hanging mass of stringy and sloughing muscle and tendon, the rest of the limb being hidden from sight by unclean rags.