Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in IndiaVan Doren, Alice B. (Alice Boucher)
History
Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in India
Van Doren, Alice B. (Alice Boucher)
India -- Social conditions; Women -- India
And so, in rented buildings, the Medical School started life. If ever an
institution passed its first year in a hand-to-mouth existence, this one
has. Short of funds save as mercifully provided by private means; short
of doctors for the staff; short of buildings in which to house its
increasing student body, for it has grown from fourteen to sixty-seven;
short, in fine, of everything needed except faith and enthusiasm and
hard work on the part of its founders, it has yet gone on; the girls
have been housed, classes have been taught, examinations passed, and the
first class is ready to go out into the world of work.
Just here perhaps one brief explanation should be made. These girls will
not be _doctors_ in the narrowly technical sense, for the Government of
India reserves the doctor's degree for such students as have first taken
a college diploma and then on top of it a still more demanding medical
course of five years. These students will receive the degree of Licensed
Medical Practitioner (L.M.P.) which authorizes them to practise medicine
and surgery and even to be in charge of a hospital. The full college
may come, we hope, not many years hence, when funds become available.
Meantime, this school will year by year be turning out its quota of
medical workers whose usefulness cannot be over-estimated.
[Illustration: FIRST BUILDING AT NEW MEDICAL SCHOOL, VELLORE, WHICH IS
HOUSING OUR STUDENTS]
A Visit to Vellore.
Let us pay a visit to the School and see it as it is in its present
state of makeshift. Since its beginning it has dwelt, like Paul the
prisoner, "in its own hired house," but Paul's epistles tell of no such
uncertainty in his tenure of his rented dwelling, as that which has
afflicted this institution. The housing shortage which has distressed
New York has reached even to Vellore. Two rented bungalows were lost,
and, as an emergency measure, the future Nurses' Home was erected in
great haste on the town site and at once utilized as a dormitory with
some rooms set aside for lectures as well.
Corpses--and Children.
Let us first pay a visit to "Pentland," the one remaining "hired house,"
in which the Freshmen have their home with Dr. Mary Samuel, the Indian
member of the staff, as their house mother. Just behind it is the
thatched shed, carefully walled in, which serves as the dissecting room.
To the uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, for
cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables. The casual visitor
sympathizes with the Hindu student who confides to you that during her
first days of work in the dissecting room she could only sleep when
firmly flanked by a friend on each side of her "to keep off the spirits
that walk by night." After a few weeks of experience, however, the
fascinating search for nerve and muscle, tendon, vein, and artery
becomes the dominating state of consciousness, and the scientific spirit
excludes all resentment at the disagreeable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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