Adam's Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Behar/Report 2/Section 7
SECTION VII.
State of Native Medical Practice.
The state of Native Medical Practice in the district is so intimately connected with the welfare of the people that it could not be wholly overlooked; and as the few facts that I have collected tend additionally to illustrate their character and condition, it would be improper to omit them. They are submitted with deference to those who may have made professional inquiries, and can form a professional judgment on the subject.
The number of those who may be called general practitioners and who rank highest in the native medical profession in Nattore, is 123, of whom 89 are Hindus and 34 are Mahomedans. The Medical School at Vaidya Belghariya possesses considerable interest, since it is, as far as I can ascertain, the only institution of the kind in the district, and the number of such institutions throughout Bengal is, I believe, very limited. The two medical teachers of this school are employed as domestic physicians by two wealthy families, and they have eaeh also a respectable general practice. As a domestic physician, the junior teacher has a fixed salary of twenty-five rupees a month; while the senior teacher in the same capacity has only fifteen rupees a month, and that only as long as his attendance may be required during periods of sickness in the family that employs him. I have spoken of that family as wealthy, but it is only comparatively so, being in very reduced circumstances; and to that cause rather than to the low estimation in which the physician is held, we must ascribe the scanty remuneration he receives. At another place, Hajra Nattore, No. 26, there are three educated Hindu practitioners, all three brahmans and brothers and more or less acquainted with Sanscrit, having acquired the grammar of the language at Bejpara Amhatti, and subsequently applied their knowledge of it to the study of the medical works in that language. The eldest has practised since he was eighteen, and he is now sixty-two years of age, and employs his leisure in instructing his two nephews. On an average of the year he estimates the income derived from his practice at five rupees a month, while one of his brothers who is in less repute estimates his own income at three rupees. At a third place, Haridev Khalasi, No. 100, there are four educated Hindu practitioners, three of whom appeared to be in considerable repute for skill and learning. They were all absent, and I had not an opportunity of conversing with them; but their neighbours and friends estimated their monthly professional income at eight, ten, and twelve rupees, respectively. There are at most two or three other educated Hindu physicians in Nattore, and all the rest are professionally uneducated, the only knowledge they possess of medicine being derived from Bengali translations of Sanscrit works which describe the symptoms of the principal diseases and prescribe the articles of the native materia medica that should be employed for their cure, and the proportions in which they should be compounded. I have not been able to ascertain that there is a single educated Musalman physician in Nattore, and consequently the 34 Mahomedan practitioners I have mentioned, rank with the uneducated class of Hindu practitioners, deriving all their knowledge of medicine from Bengali translations of Sanskrit works to the prescriptions of which they servilely adhere.
The only difference that I have been able to discover between the educated and uneducated classes of native practitioners is that the former prescribe with greater confidence and precision from the original authorities, and the latter with greater doubt and uncertainty from loose and imperfect translations. The mode of treatment is substantially the same, and in each case is fixed and invariable. Great attention is paid to the symptoms of disease, a careful and strict comparison being made between the descriptions of the supposed disease in the standard medical works and the actual symptoms in the case of the patient. When the identity is satisfactorily ascertained, there is then no doubt as to the practice to be adopted, for each disease has its peculiar remedy in the works of established repute, and to depart from their prescriptions would be an act of unheard-of presumption. If, with a general resemblance, there should be some slight difference of symptoms, a corresponding departure from the authorized prescription is permitted, but only as regards the medium or vehicle through which it is administered. The medicines administered are both vegetable and mineral. The former are divided into those which are employed in the crude state, as barks, leaves, common or wild roots, and fruits, &c.; and those which are sold in the druggist’s shop as camphor, cloves, cardamums, &c. They are administered either externally or in the forms of pill, powder, electuary, and decoction.
The preceding class of practitioners consists of individuals who at best know nothing of medicine as a science, but practice it as an art according to a prescribed routine, and it may well be supposed that many, especially of the uneducated class, are nothing but quacks. Still as a class they rank higher both in general estimation and in usefulness than the village doctors. Of these there are not fewer than 205 in Nattore. They have not the least semblance of medical knowledge, and they in general limit their prescriptions to the simplest vegetable preparations, either preceded or followed by the pronouncing of an incantation and by striking and blowing upon the body. Their number proves that they are in repute in the villages; and the fact is ascribable to the influence which they exercise upon the minds of the superstitious by their incantations. The village doctors are both men and women; and most of them are Mahomedans, like the class to which they principally address themselves.
The small-pox inoculators in point of information and respectability come next to the class of general practitioners. There are 21 of them in Nattore, for the most part brahmans, but uninstructed and ignorant, exercising merely the manual art of inoculation. One man sometimes inoculates from 100 to 500 children in a day, receiving, for each operation a fixed rate of payment varying from one to two annns; the less amount if the number of children is great, the greater amount if the number is small. The cow-pox has not, I believe, been introduced into this district amongst the natives, except at the head station. Elsewhere the small-pox inoculators have been found its opponents; but, as far as I can understand, their opposition does not arise from interested motives, for the cow-pox inoculation would give them as much labour and profit as they now have. Their opposition arises, I am assured, from the prejudice against using cow-pox. The veneration in which the cow is held is well known, and they fear to participate in a practice which seems to be founded on some injury done to that animal when the matter was originally extracted. The spread of the cow-pox would probably be most effectually accomplished by the employment of Musalman inoculators, whose success might in due time convince the brahman inoculators of their mistake.
Midwives are another class of practitioners that may be noticed, although it has been denied that Hindus have any. An eminent London physician, in his examination before the Medical Committee of the House of Commons, is stated to have affirmed that the inhabitants of China have no women-midwives, and no practitioners in midwifery at all. “Of course,” it is added, “the African nations and the Hindus are the same.” I enquired and noted the number of women-midwives (there is not a man-midwife in the country) in the villages of Nattore, and find that they amount to 297. They are no doubt sufficiently ignorant, as are probably the majority of women-midwives at home.
Still lower than the village doctors there is a nmerous class of pretenders who go under the general name of conjurors or charmers. The largest division of this class are the snake-conjurors; their number in the single police sub-division of Nattore being not less than 722. There are few villages without one, and in some villages there are as many as ten. I could, if it were required, indicate the villages and the number in each; but instead of incumbering Table I. with such details, I have judged it sufficient to state the total number in this place. They profess to cure the bites of poisonous snakes by incantations or charms. In this district, particularly during the rainy season, snakes are numerous and excite much terror among the villagers. Nearly the whole district forming, it is believed, an old bed of the Ganges, lies very low; and the rapid increase of the waters during the rainy season drives the land-snakes from their holes, and they seek refuge in the houses of the inhabitants, who hope to obtain relief from their bites by the incantations of the conjurors. These take nothing for the performance of their rites, or for the cures they pretend to have performed. All is pecuniarily gratuitous to the individual, but they have substantial advantages which enable them to be thus liberal. When the inhabitants of a village hitherto without a conjuror think that they can afford to have one, they invite a professor of the art from a neighbouring village where there happens to be one to spare, and give him a piece of land and various privileges and immunities. He possesses great influence over the inhabitants. If a quarrel takes place, his interference will quell it sooner than that of any one else; and when he requires the aid of his neighbours in cultivating his plot of ground or in reaping its produce, it is always more readily given to him than to others. The art is not hereditary in a family or peculiar to any caste. One I met with was a boatman, another a chowkidar, and a third a weaver. Whoever learns the charm may practice it, but it is believed that those practice it most successfully who are “to the manner born,” that is, who have been born under a favorable conjunction of the planets. Every conjuror seems to have a separate charm, for I have found no two the same. They do not object to repeat it merely for the gratification of curiosity, and they allow it to be taken down in writing. Neither do they appear to have any mutual jealousy, each readily allowing the virtue of other incantations than his own. Sometimes the pretended curer of snake-bites by charms professes also to possess the power of expelling demons, and in other cases the expeller of demons disclaims being a snake-conjuror. Demon-conjurors are not numerous in Nattore; and tiger-conjurors who profess to cure the bites of tigers, although scarcely heard of in that thana, are more numerous in those parts of the district where there is a considerable space covered by jungle inhabited by wild beasts. Distinct from these three kinds of conjurors and called by a different name is a class of gifted (guni) persons who are believed to possess the power of preventing the fall of hail which would destroy or injure the crops of the villages. For this purpose when there is a prospect of a hail-storm, one of them goes out into the fields belonging to the village with a trident and a buffaloe’s horn. The trident is fixed in the ground and the Gifted makes a wide circuit around it, running naked, blowing the horn, and pronouncing incantations. It is the firm belief of the villagers that their crops are by this means protected from hail-storms. Both men and women practice this business. There are about a dozen in Nattore, and they are provided for in the same way as the conjurors.
Some of these details may appear, and in themselves probably are, unimportant, but they help to afford an insight into the character of the humblest classes of native society who constitute the great mass of the people, and whose happiness and improvement are identical with the prosperity of the country; and although they exhibit the proofs of a most imbecile superstition, yet it is a superstition which does not appear to have its origin or support in vice or depravity, but in a childish ignorance of the common laws of nature which the most imperfect education or the most limited mental cultivation would remove. These superstitions are neither Hindu nor Mahomedan, being equally repudiated by the educated portions of both classes of religionists. They are probably antecedent to both systems of faith and have been handed down from time immemorial as a local and hereditary religion of the cultivators of the soil, who, amid the extraordinary changes which in successive ages and under successive races of conquerors this country has undergone, appear always to have been left in the same degraded and prostrate condition in which they are now found.
Having come into this district not altogether unprepared to appreciate the character of the natives; moving amongst them, conversing with them, endeavouring to ascertain the extent of their knowledge and to sound the depths of their ignorance; inquiring into their feelings and wishes, their hopes and their fears, and frequently reflecting on all that I have witnessed and heard, and all that I have now recorded, I have not been able to avoid speculating on the fittest means of raising and improving their character in such a district as that to which the present Report relates. To develope the views that have occurred to me, and the mode in which I would carry those views into effect, would require more leisure than I can command at this season amid the active duties of local inquiry. I beg, however, to be permitted now to remark that, according to the best judgment I have been able to form, all the existing institutions in the district—even the highest, such as the schools of Hindu learning, and the lowest, such as the Mahomedan schools for the formal reading of the Koran, however remote they are at present from purposes of practical utility, and however unfamiliar to our minds as instruments for the communication of pure and sound knowledge, all without exception present organizations which may be turned to excellent account for the gradual accomplishment of that important purpose; and that so to employ them would be the simplest, the safest, the most popular, the most economical, and the most effectual plan for giving that stimulus to the native mind which it needs on the subject of education, and for eliciting the exertions of the natives themselves for their own improvement without which all other means must be unavailing.
| Moorshedabad; | |
| The 23rd December 1835. |
