Dr. Main's hospital is typical of mission hospitals--Dr. Christie's
hospital at Mukden, Dr. Gillison's at Hankow, Dr. Cochrane's at Peking,
and many others. There are also hospitals for women. We saw many; the
first we visited, the Presbyterian Hospital at Canton, was a good
example, impressing us not only by its efficiency, but also by the
great service it performed to the suffering {227} masses of China by
training women doctors, who are permitted to minister to their sisters
when etiquette does not permit of male medical attendance. The lady
who showed us round the hospital spoke English fluently; she was
dressed in the dress of the Cantonese woman, which suited her
profession admirably, as it consisted of a long black coat and
trousers. Some hospitals are reserved for the very poor; at Nanking,
for instance, Dr. Macklin showed us over his beggar hospital. He
follows the parable of the Good Samaritan most literally, and wherever
he finds a poor, starving, dying man, he brings him in. Clearly he
cannot afford anything but a limited accommodation for these poor
creatures, but he is on the whole most successful, and there is many a
man whom poverty had brought near to death whose life he has saved. As
one looked at those types of suffering humanity and realised the good
that Dr. Macklin was doing, one felt that the days of saintly service
were not over yet.
Another beautiful work is Dr. Main's leper hospital at Hangchow. It
was a weird and strange experience to hear those lepers singing our old
English hymns. Leprosy, as my readers doubtless know, does not often
leave open sores; it slowly eats away the body while it leaves the skin
intact; and so you see men without hands and arms yet with finger nails
upon the stump, blind men without noses, and very commonly men whose
voices are cracked and broken. These lepers are housed in an old
temple, in one of the most beautiful situations in China--a {228}
situation which is supposed to be the original of the landscape on the
old willow pattern plates; and the beauty of their surroundings
contrasts strangely with their hideous forms and harsh voices. There
was an infinite pathos when by that blue lake and purple mountain,
those harsh but plaintive voices sang the old tune of "Jesu, lover of
my soul"; and though we could not follow the Chinese words, the faces
of these poor sufferers were eloquent in expressing how fully they felt
the meaning of that hymn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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