Volume 1

Rambles and recollections of an Indian official / [Sir William Henry Sleeman].

  • William Henry Sleeman
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Rambles and recollections of an Indian official / [Sir William Henry Sleeman]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    129 for the country in the healing art, that art which, above all others, a benevolent and enlightened government should encourage among the people of India. All we have as yet done has been to provide medical attendants for our European officers, regiments, and jails. It must not, however, be supposed that the people of India aie without medical advice, for there is not a town or con- siderable village in India without its practitioners, the Hindoos following the Egyptian (Misrani), and the Musab mans the Grecian (Yunani) practice. The first prescribe little physic and much fasting; and the second follow the good old rules of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna, with which they are all tolerably well acquainted. As far as the office of physician goes, the natives of India of all classes, high and low, have much more confidence in their own practitioners than in ours, whom they consider too reckless and better adapted to treat diseases in a cold than a hot climate. They cannot afford to give the only fees which European physicians would accept; and they see them, in their hospital practice, trust much to their native assistants, who are very few of them able to read any book, much less to study the profound doctrines of the great masters of the science of medicine.^ No native ventures to offer an opinion upon this abstruse subject in any circle where he is not known to be profoundly read in either Arabic or Sanskrit lore ; nor would he venture to give a prescription ’ One of the tent-pitchers one morning, after pitching our tent, asked the loan of a small extra one for the use of his wife, who was about to be confined. The basket-maker’s wife of the village near which we were encamped was called ; and the poor woman, before we had finished our breakfast, gave birth to a daughter. The charge is half a lupee, or one shilling for a boy, and a quarter, or sixpence, for a girl. The tent-pitcher gave her ninepence, which the poor midwife thought veiy handsome. The mother had come fourteen miles upon a loaded cart over rough roads the night before; and went the same distance with her child the night after, upon the same cart. The first midwife in Europe could not have done her duty better than this poor basket-maker’s wife did hers. [W. H. S.] VOL. I.
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