Medical Work for Women by Bertha L. Selmon

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 4, 1909

Medical Work for Women

By Bertha L. Selmon

As there is almost no rational treatment of disease in China, the women are sadly neglected. I will mention one or two dispensary cases. A woman came in with a mastoid abscess resulting from middle-ear disease. She had suffered most the pain till the pus had made its way through the bone. I lanced the abscess, and put in drainage. The suffering must have been intense; yet this woman had been doing her household work, and her mother-in-law abused her because she had to take the time to come to the dispensary each day for four or five days to have the wound dressed. She made a quick recovery. One day a poor woman was brought in dying of opium poison. Her mother-in-law followed, cursing and reviling

her for being so unfilial as to take her life. That morning had brought merely a trifling incident, but it was just the straw too much for the young wife and mother to bear. She had been scolded every day since she came to the home, and this morning, for a matter for which the mother-in-law knew she was in no wise responsible, she dared to answer that she could not help it, and was then accused of impudence, and beaten by her husband at the mother-in-law’s command. This was why she took opium and ended her life of misery. Her own mother’s family came next day; and not finding the mother-in-law, whose life they sought, they smashed all the dishes and furniture, and broke up all the windows and doors in the mother-in-law’s home, by way of revenge. This is only a glance at the physical and spiritual need of our Chinese sisters. Helpless and hopeless, with no rights which any one is bound to respect, it is little wonder that to them life itself becomes a burden.

BERTHA L. SELMON, M. D.