Professional Documents
Culture Documents
to 100,000
he said, "as you have seen, there are many here who need
your skills. You will come again next year perhaps annu-
ally?"
Wives were bought like cattle. Hospitals were "men only 9 '
institutions. Sir Henry's mission established a hospital for
women in the Quetta compound, convinced husbands that
it was an economic waste to allow a wife to wither and die.
For years the backbone of his nursing staff came from the
outcast and depressed classes, many of them second genera-
tion Christians. His mission's nursing schools were the first
to give women not only training but graduate standing and
certification. Today the daughters of Pakistan's best families
are being trained as doctors and nurses.
For more than a half century Sir Henry worked toward the
the day when his hospital could be taken over completely by
indigenous leaders. "It is always a missionary's happiest
Quetta's mission hospital was originally established in 1886, and had been
rebuilt after the earthquake. In the courtyard there were small cottages
forming the caravanserai where patients were nursed by relatives who also
took care of food and cooking.
The hospital served the city and the region, catering particularly to the trans-
border nomadic Pathans who moved down through the Bolan Pass to the
southern plains during the winter, returning to the hills of Afghanistan during
the summer. Accordingly, these tribal nomads had two opportunities each
year to benefit from Western medicine.
Cataracts and neglected chronic diseases were common presentations, as
was diarrhoea. I myself suffered diarrhoea on several occasions and
progressively lost weight during my stay. Faecal tests positive for blood
and/or amoebae sentenced one to amoebicides; negatives dictated sulfas, to
which my bugs responded.
The diarrhoea was surely related to the town's contaminated water supply.
Irrigation water from the city's reservoirs flowed through the streets
alongside the footpaths. Using removable paddles, the waterman selectively
diverted the flow into separate open channels for individual sections of the
town on given days. Not surprisingly, the water reaching our vegetable
gardens in the hospital compound was murky. This public health issue didn't
seem to agitate either the city authorities or, in general, the Western
doctors!
In winter, the hospital ran an outreach clinic at Shikarpur, 200 miles to the
south. Many such clinics, known as "cataract camps", were held on the
Indian subcontinent under missionary auspices, foreshadowing the Fred
Hollows Foundation.
Cataract surgery and other procedures
Every operation began with a Christian prayer. For the anxious patient, this
was extra premedication. Local anaesthesia was used for cataract operations
patients' eyelids were kept open during the procedure with a pair of locally
made fork retractors, handheld by the assistant, one of the male nurses
trained in the hospital's own program. Graefe section with conjunctival flap
was standard, progressing to intracapsular extraction. I carried out over 100
cataract procedures in my 10 weeks, and many plastic operations on eyelids
and tear ducts. I treated one patient with retinal detachment. I also assisted
at numerous general surgical procedures and outpatient clinics.