MISSION DISPENSARY WORK by Riley Russell

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 9, 1913

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 90, No. 41.

Read the full edition

DR. RUSSELL AND HIS KOREAN DISPENSARY ASSISTANTS

MISSION DISPENSARY WORK

By Riley Russell

Twenty Thousand Patients in a Twenty-Dollar Building

[The money has been raised by our Sabbath-schools to put up a hospital building in this place.—ED.]

WE have in Soonan a small Korean house that cost twenty dollars gold, or forty yen; also one small house, where women and children may wait. This has been our dispensary. In the four years we have been here, we have seen over twenty thousand patients. The people know nothing of infection, but in the old heathen mind all disease is wind in the bones or some other part of the anatomy, and it must be let out. This is generally accomplished by means of needles of various sizes and all possible degrees of uncleanliness.

One woman we found to have been stuck nearly three hundred times in the face. It was only by diligent effort that her life was saved, so severe was the infection.

Karmatar (India) dispensary, cost of which was $60.

Two Chinese evangelists washing out the stomach of a woman who had taken a poisonous dose of raw opium.

The medical work makes openings for the gospel; for the rankest devil-worshiper, who hates Christianity and all that goes with it, will call the Christian physician when the grim monster Death faces him or his family. Only two weeks ago, while returning home from a one-hundred-mile horseback ride, I was called to see a woman about nineteen years old who could not possibly have lived more than a few hours, but the diagnosis was easy and the treatment simple, and from my saddle-bags I was able to give her almost instant relief. She and her mother walked twenty miles to see me last week, and the old woman said no one but a missionary could have known what to do, and “thus our daughter, who was the same as dead, is alive and with us well.” There are things in such work as this that shake heathenism to its foundations.

The schools are now changing these sorrowful conditions. The Union Medical School in Seoul and the Japanese medical schools are training young men in better methods. The change in government has also brought in many much-needed hygienic reforms, but Korea’s great need is yet only touched on the extreme edges.

RILEY RUSSELL, M. D.

Soonan, Korea.