The Chinese coolie loves a jest, and once he is on the laugh he will, unlike his English brother, be much more inclined to attend to serious teaching. One of the missionaries who understands this trait of the Chinese best is Dr. Duncan Main of Hangchow, where we spent two most interesting days seeing his hospitals and work and visiting his patients. There is no better testimony to his great work than his obvious popularity. Wherever he goes there are smiles and greetings. He explains as we walk who are the individuals who salute him. That great fat man who stands bowing and smiling is a {224} merchant of some wealth; his wife has been in the hospital; she has been tended by Dr. Main and by his skill has been cured. That old woman who stands by him smiling is another ex-patient. That young man with an intellectual face and a dark robe is an old medical student, now a doctor himself with a large practice, and he has settled near Dr. Main's hospital. And so his work increases and grows and the good he does must live after him. He takes us into the out-patients' room; they are a motley crowd, with strappings and bandages on various parts of their persons. While they are sitting there a lay-reader expounds to them the elements of Christian teaching. What a contrast to their minds must be the plain forcible teaching and the simple effective remedies and medicines of the Christians to the incantations and nauseous compounds of their native doctors. There is a great doubt as to what is the nature of many of the Chinese drugs. They always prescribe a vast number, many of which are apparently innocuous in their effect; they always give them in large quantities, and do not in any way attempt to isolate and extract the active properties of the things they use. You see a man eating a large bowl of some nauseous compound and you are told he is taking Chinese medicine. You ask a captain what his cargo consists of, and he tells you that it is largely made up of Chinese medicine. Some of the medicine seems to be prescribed on the principle of our old herbals; that is, there is a fancied resemblance between the plant and the disease. Others seem to {225} come from well-known remedies administered in various ways; ground-up deer's horns from the mountains of Siberia has probably much the same effect as chalk has in our pharmacopoeia. But there also seems to be some possibility that the Chinese doctors have certain useful remedies which are unknown to Western medicine.