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THE "ACTUAL CAUTERY" CURE 61
ample suffice. A man arrived from the mountains,
several days' journey distant, with the flesh almost
gone from one of his arms. Four or five weeks
earlier he had shot off the hand by accident, and
the flesh instead of healing had steadily sloughed
and left the bone projecting. Finding the stump
much in his way, the patient had then sawn ofl* the
offending length himself
Women are brought in with strange nervous diseases,—nothing
wrong except delusions that they cannot
speak, cannot walk, one at least that she could not
swallow. She was in a fair way of dying from starvation
when her relatives conveyed her hurriedly to the
Mission hospital. Now for some obscure reason cases of
this kind are rather frequent, and a sure remedy awaits
them if the friends consent to the treatment necessary
; consent of the friends, however, is necessary,
and they have to witness the operation. What that
but the " actual cautery "
is precisely I do not know ;
is said to play an important part. Under its compelling
influence speech suddenly returns in a flood ; the
physically sound, lately unable to walk, able to do
nothing but lie at full length, take to sudden leaping
and always after these rapid recoveries the patient
embraces the doctor's knees with exclamations of
gratitude. So it all fell out with the woman unable
to swallow ; she hastily swallowed water and bread
in demonstration of her cure, and was duly grateful.
But straightway her friends, who had witnessed the
sudden recovery, developed a very ill humour. With
nothing really wrong, why, they argued, had any
cure at all been needful : the patient had caused
them a vast deal of trouble and expense that might
well have been avoided : as consolation for their needless
worries they took her away and beat her soundly.
There is no end to the odd incidents of this hospital.
" Who are those people ? " asked the English nurse,
seeing a strange party seated gravely round a body
on the lawn.
" They have brought a cholera case," answered the