OCR Text |
Show A Few of our Patients at Lintsingchow. From both a professional and a humanitarian point of view our patients have been quite as interesting as other years. They have here been quite as willing to listen to the Gospel and perhaps more so as new things in China are treated with less of suspicion. Our patients have included rich and poor, old and young, men, women and children. The official with plumed hat and silk clothes and the ragged beggar covered with sores and vermin, wealthy ladies and tired thin-faced mothers who never know what it is to have enough food f or thems e 1 ve s and their little children. Some come for the slightest causes and some only when they think themselves at death's door. There have been several patients who were treated by Dr. Wagner when he was here. For twenty years one of these has carried with her the memory of a single visit to the dispensary and has had the purpose to return. She was told on that first visit that her eyes needed an operation. ' 'But' ' , she said in telling her story, " 'I could not stay them, for there was no one at home to care for the children. Now the children are all grown. The one who was a baby then is in a government school. ' ' And she added with pride, ' 'He has already passed his first examinations for a degree. So now I have come.'' Day after day she listened to the Bible woman's teaching with very intelligent interest, and finally said, ''My son thinks there are no gods, and says he will worship nothing, but if I could just tell him this doctrine as I have heard it here, I'm sure he would believe.'' Another woman, the wife of tke yamen teacher in one of our neighboring hsien cities, the evening before she was to leave the hospital came to the Bible woman and said, •'Now please tell me again from the beginning all this teaching, everything I have heard here, so I can tell my husband. ' ' We have always tried to discourage the giving of presents by the patients to any of the hospital force, and have asked that instead money contributions be made to the hospital. However presents can not always be refused. These have ranged in elaborateness from a bowl of garlic dumplings to a feast sent by the city official which was truly fit for a king. During the fourth month fair among the many who presented themselves for treatment were three old women from thirty miles away who had been patients when they came to the fair last year. They greeted the entire hospital force as old friends and then singling out the Doctor told how they had longed to see her all the year, and now were bringing her a little present. The present tied in a blue handkerchief proved to be thirteen hard boiled eggs. Some were whole and some demonstrated the fact hat they really had been hard-boiled. The women explained that uncooked eggs would have made a more elegant present but fresh eggs were rather hard to carry. |