It was also a new thing for men to volunteer for hospital work, as a good many did under the auspices of the Red Crescent. They had charming manners, as Turks usually do; but they proved less efficient than the women, for the reason that the Turk of any breeding, and particularly the Constantinople Turk, has no tradition of working with his hands. It is not a question of snobbishness. He is in many ways more democratic than we. He treats servants on a greater equality, and the humble rise in the world even more easily than with us. But it is not the thing for him to use his hands except in sport and in war. He is far too dignified a being to carry a tray, for instance, in the presence of women or other inferiors. Add to this his natural disinclination to do anything he can get any one else to do, and you conceive the difficulties which might surround the attendance of such a helper. Difficulties of another kind were sometimes experienced when Red Cross and Red Crescent doctors were thrown together. Medicine is a science to which the Turks rather lean, I believe, and there are excellent physicians and surgeons among them. But the excellent man, in science at any rate, is hardly appreciated in Constantinople as yet. The persuasive man has the lead of him. A foreign doctor described in my hearing the “eminent superficiality” of some of his Turkish colleagues, who had the graces and elegancies of diplomats and spoke French perfectly but who seemed to lack the plain, unvarnished, every-day essentials of surgery. And some sensitiveness or petty jealousy in them seemed to make them wish, although there was work enough for everybody, to make themselves felt wherever their foreign colleagues were at work. One of them was supposed to supervise the operations of my informant. The Turk was very agreeable, and interfered as little as possible, but reserved the right of prescribing whatever medicine might be required by the soldiers. This he did with great zeal, paying small heed to his European colleague’s opinion of a case. But to ascertain that the patient took the medicine prescribed he considered no part of his duty. Whole boxes of pills and powders were regularly found under the soldiers’ pillows, where they poked them as soon as the doctor turned his back.