The hakims practise, I was informed, according to the Yunani or ancient Greek system of medicine. The only books I could obtain on this system were written in Arabic, and this was an obstacle to my studying them; but, whatever the teaching of their books may be, the hakims I found knew nothing whatever about anatomy, physiology, or pathology. Their treatment of disease is entirely empirical. They act according to “authority.” Studying disease, not in the living subject, but in their books only, they have made no progress whatever upon the teaching of their ancestors. A sick man is brought to them, and some prominent symptom forces itself upon their notice. This is at once diagnosed as the disease. For instance, pain in the abdomen is to them “colic.” It is described in their books and a certain line of treatment is directed. They do not examine their patient, or attempt to find a cause for his pain; nor do they differentiate between different forms of colic, for they have not noticed that pain in the abdomen is sometimes unconnected with the bowel. As an example, Perwana Khan, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief in Kabul (“Dipti Supersala”), was for some weeks attended by the hakims, who, reporting him to be suffering from colic, administered purge after purge. As, however, he did not seem to be getting any better, the Amîr desired me to examine him. I found he had acute pain in the left loin, shooting downwards; the attacks of pain came on, he said, after he had been riding on horseback, and he had other symptoms, all pointing unmistakably to stone in the kidney. I administered suitable medicine for the relief of the pain, and he was overjoyed, imagining himself cured. I explained, however, to His Highness what was wrong. To the hakims dropsy is a disease, and can be cured by the treatment set forth in their books. No attempt is made to discover the cause of the dropsy--whether it is due to kidney disease, heart, liver, lung or blood disease--it is simply an accumulation of gas (bâd) in the tissues! In diseases of the chest, they do not, of course, employ auscultation with a stethoscope, nor percussion; and bronchitis, pneumonia, and phthisis are classed together under the name of sûrfa, or cough. This, they say, is due to an accumulation of “slime” (balgham) in the body. In some cases the sûrfa is accompanied by dard i sîna, or pain in the chest, and occasionally blood as well as slime is coughed up: these are recognized as bad cases. I have related the case of the young brigadier in Turkestan, cousin of the Sultana, whom the hakims were treating for sûrfa, and who was dying of an improperly treated pneumonia, which had, eventually, become tubercular. As I did not want to have the credit of killing him, I sent in my report to the Amîr at once. The hakims did not in the least mind my being sent for to their cases, after they had become hopeless; for, like the dressers, they said, “Behold, the Feringhi doctor cannot cure them any more than we.”