The Mission Hospital is one of the largest and best equipped in the Far East, and besides doing a great medical and surgical work, is a medical school in which students pass through a four years’ curriculum. There also Dr. Christie gives illustrated popular scientific lectures in the winter, which are attended among others by a number of sons of mandarins. Donations, both of money and food, are contributed to this hospital both by officials and merchants; and General Tso, a most charitable man and beloved by the poor, only the night before he started for Korea, sent a bag of tickets for ice, so that the hospital might not suffer for the lack of it during his absence. Only a few months before he presented it with a handsome tablet and subscription.[30] Even in so civilized a city as Mukden, with its schools and literary examinations, its thousands of literary aspirants to official position, its streets full of a busy and splendid officialism, its enormous trade, its banks and _yamens_, its 20,000 Mussulmans, with their many mosques, and hatred of the pig, and the slow interpenetration of enlightened Western ideas, Chinese superstitions of the usual order, well-known by every reader, prevail. The system of medicine, though it contains the knowledge and use of some valuable native drugs among the sixty which are exported, is in many respects extremely barbarous. The doctors have no operative surgery and cannot even tie an artery! They use cupping, the cautery, and acupuncture hot or cold, with long coarse uncleanly needles, with which they pierce the liver, joints, and stomach for pains, sprains, and rheumatism. They close all abscesses, wounds, and ulcers with a black impervious plaster. Witch doctors are resorted to in cases of hysteria or mental derangement. Vaccination is now to some extent adopted with calf or transferred lymph, the puncture being made in the nostrils. In order to ascertain whether a sick person is likely to live, they plunge long needles into the body, and give up the case as hopeless if blood does not flow. When death is near the friends dress the patient in the best clothes they can afford and remove him from the _kang_ (the usual elevated sleeping place) to the floor, or lay him on ashes. As the spirit departs they cry loudly in the ear. In connection with death, it may be mentioned that some of the most striking shops in Mukden, after the coffin shops, are those in which are manufactured and sold admirable lifesize representations of horses, men, asses, elephants, carts, and all the articles of luxury of this life, which are carried in procession and are burned at the grave, sometimes to the value of $1,000.