Jasper County Democrat, Volume 3, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 November 1900 — THE CHINESE DOCTOR. [ARTICLE]

THE CHINESE DOCTOR.

Western World Several Centuries Behind the Orient in Medical Practice. Don’t laugh at the Chinese doctor; he knows more than you think. The western world has not yet ceased marveling over the discoveries of Pasteur, but the agency of germs in causing disease has been recognized in Chinese medical theory and practice for a thousand years. Trephining of the skull is a triumph of comparatively modem surgery with us, but the Chinese have been practicing it for ages. Still newer to the surgeons of Europe and l America—the sensation of last year, in fact—is the “buttonhole operation” for removing a kidney, but the same operation is both de’Scribed and illustrated in a Chinese medical work published in 1622. No, says the New York Herald, the Chinese doctor, with his eyes blinking through huge tortoise-shell spectacles, is no object for ridicule. It would be much better to laugh at the doctor of your grandfather, or even your father—the dispenser of boluses and black draughts, who warned you that night air was poisonous, and remarked that a wound was “suppurating nicely” where a modem surgeon would recognize the horror of bloodpoisoning. That medicine is the noblest of all callings has only within a generation or two won universal acknowledgment in the western world—with all due respect to the clergy, who, as a witty N ew York surgeon paints it, are not called upon to face the embarrassment of an autopsy. But in China this truth was appreciated in the dawn of history, and it is traditon&l there that a physician should wield the social and political influence of a mandarin. Compare this with the state of things in England a century ago, where the village barber was also the village surgeon. In his method of collecting fees the Chinese doctor is several centuries ahead of his western rival. He draws a regular income from his patients while they remain in good health, but as soon as one of them falls ill the contribution from that family is cut off, and the ghost refuses to walk again until the doctor has put the sick member on his legs. This inculcates in the medical man a deep sense of personal responsibility and gives him his highest prosperity at the fitting time—when his patents are all in the best of health. The American humorist who writes delicate jokes about the glee of the medical fraternity about the appearance of an epidemic would have to go out of business if he moved to China. There is one respect in which the healing profession in China lags behind the age. Doctors there are not banded together in the brotherly pursuit of knowledge as they are in western lands. On the contrary, each keeps his discoveries secret, and medical knowledge is handed down from father to son as a private inheritance. Hence if a physician hundreds of years ago won fame by his successful treatment of a certain disease his descendant to-day enjoys the 6ame renown and profits by it.