Missions -- Uganda; Negrillos; Uganda -- Description and travel
A daily attendance of thirty to fifty sick folk soon exhausted our
limited supply of drugs, and when Dr. and Mrs. A. Cook, on an itinerating
round, paid a medical visit to Toro twelve months after our arrival
they found the medicine almost completely used up. Till the arrival of
fresh stores the patients were being kept together by supplementing the
diminished stock with table salt, mixed spice, and curry powder. This
latter I found was a much-appreciated prescription, and as none of the
missionaries were partial to it and each had a good supply among their
stores, I dispensed it generously to dyspeptic patients. You never saw
such agonizing grimaces as when they swallowed a spoonful raw, but they
smacked their lips, saying, “Omubazi mubingi muno muno,” “Medicine very
very good,” and would have finished off the whole tin if they had been
allowed.
That visit from the real “medicine-man” was a grand time for our people,
and they were not slow to show their appreciation and wonderment when
opthalmic patients found themselves with “new windows,” and surgical
subjects, the possessors of “new bodies.” After that the Toro dispensary
became amalgamated with the Mengo Medical Mission, and was regularly
supplied with medicines. The chief diseases met with out there are skin
complaints, malaria, dyspepsia, pleurisy, bronchitis, besides paralysis,
muscular rheumatism, dysentery, and pneumonia. Owing to the inexperience
of the dispenser nothing surgical was attempted in those days beyond
lancing abscesses and gums, cutting tongue-tied infants, and stitching up
leopard-torn patients. One man was brought in from a leopard hunt in a
terrible condition; limbs and body were badly damaged, while the face was
scarcely visible, the flesh of forehead and one cheek having been torn
away, exposing bone and teeth. The extraordinary thing was, that after
weeks and weeks of careful treatment, some very deep scars were the only
signs remaining of the terrible ordeal he had passed through.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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