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the baby would be born painlessly, easily, almost before she
was aware of it, and so her day's work would not be inter-
fered with. One injunction was Go home, put an apron
around you, between your legs, so that the baby shall not
drop and strike the ground, and then swallow this pulverized
flesh of a turtle!
The old, unregistered Chinese doctor could advertise, an
this he did in a most spectacular manner. Usually he had
a large sign, an immense painted sign above his house, to
show what a wonderful healer he was. Not only that, but
in his waiting room and surgery would be found great
medals and shields which wealthy and frightened patients
had given him to testify to the miraculous way in which he
with coloured medicines, powders and potions, had cured
then of unknown and unspecified diseases.
The poor dentist was not so lucky, the older style
dentist, that is. Most of the time he had no particular house
in which to see patients, but he saw them in the street.
The victim sat down on a box and the dentist carried out
his examination, his poking and probing, in full view of an
appreciative audience. Then, with a lot of strange man-
oeuvres and gesticulations, he would proceed to extract the
faulty tooth. Proceed is the right term because if the
patient was frightened or excessively noisy it was not always
easy to do an extraction and at times the dentist would not
hesitate to call upon bystanders to hold the struggling
victim. There was no anaesthetic used. The dentist did not
advertise as the doctors did with signs and shields and
medals, but instead around his neck he wore strings of
teeth which he had extracted. Whenever he had extracted
a tooth, that tooth would be picked up, carefully cleaned,
and a hole drilled through it. It would then be threaded on
to a string to add one more testimony to the skill of the
dentist who had pulled so many.
It used to annoy us considerably when patients on whom
we had lavished much time and care, and to whom we had
given the very latest treatment and prescribed expensive
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drugs, crept surreptitiously into the back entrance of the old
Chinese doctor's premises for treatment by him. We claimed
that we cured the patient. The quack claimed that he cured.
But the patient said nothing, he was too glad to be free of
his ill.
As we became more and more advanced in our studies
and walked the wards of the hospital we had on frequent
occasions to go out with a full qualified doctor to treat
people in their own homes, to assist at operations. Some-
times we had to descend the cliffs to inaccessible places,
perhaps to some place where some poor unfortunate had
fallen over and shattered bones or lacerated flesh almost
beyond repair. We had visits to those who had floating
homes upon the rivers. In the Kialing river there are people
who live on house-boats, or even rafts of bamboo covered
with matting on which they erect little huts. These swayed
and bobbed at the bank of the river, and, unless we were
careful, particularly at night, it was remarkably easy to miss
one's footing or to stand firmly upon a loose piece of
bamboo which merely sank beneath one. Then one was
not at all cheered by the laughter of the inevitable crowd of
small boys who always gathered on such unfortunate occa-
sions. The old Chinese peasants were able to put up with
an amazing amount of pain. They never complained and
they were always grateful for what we could do for them.
We used to go out of our way to help the old people, per-
haps help to clean up their little hut, or prepare food for
them, but with the younger generation things were not so
pleasant. They were getting restive, they were getting strange
ideas. The men from Moscow were circulating among
them, preparing them for the advent of Communism. We
knew it, but there was nothing we could do except to stand
by and watch helplessly.
But before we became so qualified we had an enormous
amount of study to do, study a whole diversity of subjects
for as long as fourteen hours a day. Magnetism as well as
Electricity, to quote just two. I well remember the first
lecture I attended on Magnetism. Then it was a subject
almost entirely unknown to me. It was perhaps as inter-
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esting in its way as that which I attended on Electricity.
The lecturer was not really a very pleasant individual, but
here is what happened.
Huang had pushed his way through the crowd to read
notices on the board to see where we should go for the next
class. He started reading, then, Hoy, Lobsang, he called
across to me, we've got a lecture on Magnetism this
afternoon. We were glad to see that we were in the same
class because we had formed a very sincere friendship. We
walked out into the quadrangle, across and into a class-
room next door to that devoted to Electricity. We entered.
Inside there was a lot of equipment much the same, it
seemed to us, as that dealing with Electricity proper. Coils
of wire, strange pieces of metal bent roughly to a horse
shoe shape. Black rods, glass rods, and various glass
boxes containing what looked like water, and bits of wood and
lead. We took our places and the lecturer came in and
stalked ponderously to his table. He was a heavy man,
heavy in body, heavy in mind. Certainly he had a very
good opinion of his own abilities, a far greater opinion of
his abilities than his colleagues had of them! He too had
been to America, and whereas some of the others of the
tutorial staff had returned knowing how little they really
knew, this one was utterly convinced that he knew every-
thing that his own brain was infallible. He took his place
and for some reason picked up a wooden hammer and
rapped violently on his desk. Silence! he roared, although
there had not been a sound. We are going to do Magne-
tism, the first lecture for some of you on this absorbing
subject, he said, he picked up one of the bars bent in the
shape of a horse-shoe. This, he said, has a field
around it. I immediately thought of grazing horses. He
said, "I am going to show you how to outline the field of
the magnet with iron dust. Magnetism, he went on, will
activate each particle of this iron which will then draw
for itself the exact outline of the force which motivates it.
I incautiously remarked to Huang who was sitting behind
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