Twenty Thousand Patients in a Twenty-Dollar Building by Riley Russell, M. D.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 20, 1913

Twenty Thousand Patients in a Twenty-Dollar Building

By Riley Russell, M. D.

RILEY RUSSELL, M. D.

A LITTLE over four years ago we came from the United States to Soonan, Korea, where we are now located. We have a small Korean house that cost twenty dollars gold, or forty yen; also one small house, where women and children may wait.

In the four years we have been here we have seen over twenty thousand patients. This may seem incredible to the people in the home land, but in these old densely populated countries it is different.

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 whom we found to have been stuck nearly three hundred times in the face to let out the bad blood and wind, sent for us, and it was only by diligent effort on our part that her life was saved, so severe was the infection.

We are constantly struck with the similarity between these conditions and those prevailing at the time of Christ’s ministry on earth. Leprosy is common in the south. Cholera is present every summer. And the pest, Asiatic plague, is always in hearing distance.

The Great Physician gave to the world the example of spending much of his time in relieving the distress of the people and diffusing life and peace. Satan’s object is to cause misery, woe, and, at last, death. So it is no wonder that here where the arch-rebel is feared and worshiped the degradation is so apparent. The infant mortality is so high that the population is hardly holding its own.

The medical work gives prestige to,

and 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. One woman who had a felon which left the finger bone protruding, came to the dispensary after suffering for three months. A little cocain and ten minutes fixed it up, so that in ten days she was well. Her hold on devil-worship was so badly shaken that she listened intently to the old, old story.

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.