\ a vrt . /" THE UNION MISSIONARY 'medical SCHOOL AT VELLORE » “If she have sent her servants in our pain, If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword. If she have given back our sick again And to the breast the weakling lips restored, Is it a little thing that she has wrought? Then Life and Death and Motherhood be nought” Kipling’s "Song of the Women ” This booklet is one of a series of seven describing the Women’s Union Christian Colleges in the Orient and published by the Joint Committee on these colleges. The ten cooperating Women’s Boards of For- eign Missions in America provide the main- tenance but are unable to secure land and buildings which rapid growth has made necessary. All are in temporary crowded quarters. The Trustees of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund have promised approximately a million dollars toward the three millions required. This conditional pledge must be met before January 1, 1923. If the story of this adventure in Interna- tional Friendship and the appeal for aid seem important to you will you not send your check or pledge to the Assistant Treas- urer of the Joint Committee, Miss Hilda L. Olson, 300 Ford Building, Boston, Mass., or to the Treasurer of your own Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions, designating a special college or building if you desire. In the Laboratory at Vellore JOINT COMMITTEE OF THE WOMEN’S UNION CHRISTIAN COLLEGES IN THE ORIENT 1921 Dr. Scudder and the Medical Students at Vellore THE UNION MISSIONARY MEDICAL SCHOOL AT VELLORE ETTERS of brass are brittle compared with the fetters of Caste and Custom with which the women of India are bound. Our good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people can, how hardly, pierce that stern resistance. Nevertheless, mighty through God are the weapons He gives us to the pulling down of strongholds. This sketch sets forth one potent weapon already in our hands with which to strike off those fetters. But, first, what do Caste and Custom denote? Just what is the resistance with which we have to reckon? CONSEQUENCES ^ ^ as ^ een we ^ sa ^ ^ at Caste, the most OF BREAKING appalling social thraldom suffered by any CASTE people on earth, defies definition. It is the division of the Hindu people into strictly defined classes ac- cording to the condition or avocation of their ancestors. It determines every circumstance of daily life: birth, death, marriage, cooking, eating, contact with their fellowmen. This last to such a pitch that a glance by a person of another caste at food made ready for consumption entails the casting away by its possessors of that food as polluted and poisonous. In Southern India, devoted missionaries are seeking to carry the Gospel into the homes of the people of various castes, higher and lower. We see, as an illustration of what not infrequently follows the preaching of the Word, a young wife lying bruised and unconscious on the floor of the inner room of a Hindu house.. 3 Her husband, encouraged by her own mother, has set himself to make her conform to a certain Caste custom, suspicion being aroused that she is coming under Christian influence. This ceremonial is idolatrous. The girl-wife has refused. Her husband beat her then, blow upon blow, till she fell senseless. They brought her around and began again. There is no redress. She is not free to be a Christian. But sometimes a young girl in a high caste home has had even the courage to break her own chains and confess Christ in baptism. The result? She disappears. Sometimes she is immured for life in a dark corner of the Hindu house; some- times a frail little body is found thrown outside the house door. A crime? Yes. But nobody is convicted. “Caste sees to that.” Following this an interdict may be laid upon a whole village, forbidding all further communication with those who would teach “the Way.” CONFUSION There is confusion worse than death. There WORSE THAN have been young children with hearts touched DEATH by the love of Christ who have been for that reason constrained to Caste obedience by “mind- bewildering poison.” Others have been forced into flames of foul impurity in which their innocence was burnt to ashes. Ashes rubbed upon the brow of these little ones are the significant sign of their submission to that Invisible Hand which manipulates the fabric of Hinduism. “It makes one’s heart sick to think of them and the hellisl means invented to turn them from Christ” writes a mis- sionary. And Mr. Kipling says, “The foundations of life are rotten, utterly rotten, and beastly rotten The country cannot advance a step. Half of it is morally dead, and worse than dead.” Hardly less terrible than the tyranny of THE TYRANNY c as t e with w hich it is closely interwoven, is that of Custom. Upon the women of India in the upper classes this weight presses heaviest. Here we 4 strike the essential body of Hindu law, the Code of Manu, older than the Law of Moses, covering social and domestic life. A few of its precepts follow: “Sinful woman must be as foul as falsehood itself. This is a fixed law.” “Though destitute of every virtue, or seeking pleasure else- where, yet a husband must be constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife.” “A woman is not allowed to go out of the house without the consent of her husband.” But, someone will comment, these are ancient phrases not in effect in modern life. Common proverbs such as the fol- lowing, current today in India, prove that these dicta of Manu are not dead letter: “He is a fool who considers his wife as his friend.” “Educating a woman is like putting a knife in the hands of a monkey.” OPINIONS OF These proverbs are echoed in recent utter- MODERN HINDU ances of an educated, English-speaking GENTLEMEN Hindu gentleman. “The average wish of a young man among us nowadays,” he writes, “is to marry a girl who is industrious and who knows some art (craft or industry). .They don’t want a B. A. but a B. M. (Basket Mender); not an M. A. but an M. M. (Milk Maid) ! She must keep poultry. They want one who can really be of service at home Moreover, when our girls finish higher education they are at least twenty-one years of age To our people, such brides are very, very old I do not believe in the goodness of a woman who is not fit to be a wife and a mother. What is she good for?” Such is our Hindu friend’s triumphant climax. Plainly he has had no suspicion that a woman may have a soul. To him, distressed at thought of the aged bride of twenty- one years, the sight of the child-wife of eight or nine, the child mother of twelve, must be particularly pleasing. We read of one such, “quite a little girl, and as playful as a kitten. Her soft round arms and little dimpled hands looked fit for no harder work than play, but she was pounding rice when I saw her, and looked tired, and as if she wanted her mother A very old man hobbled in as I sat there. He was crippled, and leaned full weight with both hands on his stick. He seemed asthmatic, too, and coughed and panted wofully. A withered, decrepit, old ghoul. The child stood up when he came in and touched her neck where the marriage symbol lay. Then I knew he was her husband.” Be sure this old man had paid a high price to the parents for that dainty bit of flesh and blood. Neither he, nor they, nor our vigorous young Hindu foe of education-for-women, would find anything unnatural in such a marriage. “It is our custom” they would say. That is final. Accursed is a strong word, a terrible word, CHILD WIDOWS but is not too strong, too terrible, for the lot to which Custom and Superstition con- demn the child widows of India. It is a familiar story this of “cold suttee”: — the betrothal in infancy; the death of the bridegroom; the child-bride, who perhaps has never seen him, held guilty therefor; the life sentence which is disgrace, ill-treatment, the single coarse garment, her touch pollution, her title, rand equivalent to harlot. Accursed she is counted in her family; doubly so by herself. Whither can the child widow turn for escape? No respectable family will have her for a servant. She has been rendered repulsive in ap- pearance by the shaving of her head. She is absolutely ignorant, absolutely destitute, owning only her single gar- ment. The alternatives before her are submission to her wretched lot, suicide, or a life of infamy. Suicide is common; still more common the life of shame. From the ranks of child widows are drawn many recruits for the temple-girls, those “tied to the god.” “Tied indeed,” cries Amy Car- michael, who knows whereof she speaks; “tied with ropes 6 Satan twisted in his cruellest hour in hell,” for the Holy Brahman, whose toys these children become, is of all men most vile. It being universally accepted by Hindu and SECLUSION OF Moslem alike in India that woman is desti- WOMEN tute of soul or of virtue, women of the higher castes are, as is a familiar fact, immured for life within zenana or harem, in what Kipling calls a worse than penal confinement. Do not imagine these child-wives as Oriental beauties living in luxurious delight a la Lalla Rookh. They are, for the most part, poorly and plainly clad; they sit on mud floors in the darkest and dirtiest apartments in the Indian establishment. They are ignorant, apathetic, forced by the very logic of the situation to gossip and intrigue. Mrs. Peabody, when in South India, visited in the house of a Mohammedan noble in Vellore into which a Christian mis- sionary woman had been admitted as teacher, as occurs some- times in fairly liberal circles. In the company was a charming girl of sixteen who was called upon to recite for the pleasure of the American guest. To her surprise the finely rendered recitation proved to be the 121st Psalm. At the close, Mrs. Peabody asked if the Psalm did not remind the speaker of the encircling hills around her own city. To this the young Mohammedan girl replied simply, “I have never seen them.” She was not blind. She had lived her life in Vellore. No man, save her father or husband, may HOW IT FARES j 00 ^ U p 0n the face of a secluded woman, IN SICKNESS , T . . Hindu or Moslem. Never in sickness or in face of death can a male physician minister to her needs. An Anglo-Indian doctor tells us of a friend of his, a native Indian physician, a Sikh by birth and religion, whose son had brought his wife home to his father’s house ac- cording to patriarchal fashion. The little girl-wife was taken dangerously ill. The father-in-law, albeit the instincts 7 Women Who Toil to Build Colleges in India alike of physician and family affection stirred strongly within him, could do nothing for her. The prohibition of Custom was immutable. What of the native practice of medicine in India? Volumes might be written on the atrocities and absurdities of wizards, quack doctors, and the hideous usages of native midwifery. The ministry of Christian physicians comes as a revelation to the tortured victims. AN EXAMPLE OF The scene is a ward in a Christian Hospital CHRISTIAN for women in South India. The patients TREATMENT in adjacent beds, convalescents, converse to- gether. “What’s the matter with you?” says bed No. 1 contentedly. “My husband became angry with me, because the meal wasn’t ready when he came home and he cut my face. The Doctor Miss Sahib has mended me, she has done what my own mother would not do.” Said another in reply to the question, “The cow horned my arm, but until I got pneumonia I couldn’t stop milking or making bread for the father of my children, even if it was broken. The hospital is my Mahap (mother-father).” “What care would you get at home?” chimed NON-CHRISTIAN j n ano ther who had been burning up with TREATMENT , , T ... t . , b / . , fever. “Oh! I would be out in the deserted part of the woman’s quarters. It would be a wonderful thing if any one would pass me a cup of water,” she replied. From another bed, a young wife of sixteen spoke of having been ill with abscesses. “One broiling day,” she said, “I had fainted with thirst. The midwives had neglected me all through the night, and, thinking I was dying, they threw me from the cord-bed to the floor, and dragged me down the steep stone staircase to the lowest cellar where I was lying, next to the evil-smelling dust-bin, ready for removal by the carriers of the dead, when the Doctor Miss Sahib found me and brought me here. She is my mother and I am her child.” An old woman in Bed No. 4 exhorts the patients around her to trust the mission workers. “I was against them once,” she tells them, “but now I know what love means. Caste? What is caste? I believe in the goodness they show. That is their Caste.” Words profoundly wise! THE PROBLEM The problem has been stated, or rather, un- STATED; WHAT derstated, merely suggested. Where do we IS ITS SOLUTION? see solution? How bring to these darkened homes, darkened minds, tortured bodies, the light which is the life of men? The medical practice of Christian women among the wo- men of India has thus far proved the most availing, although by no means the only means to these ends. Says Dr. Moorshead, “By women doctors alone can the very great amount of pitiful suffering prevailing amongst immense multitudes of heathen and Moslem women be effectually al- leviated or cured.” Yes, the Christian Woman Doctor finds ready admission to the homes of India in which no other missionary could be received. She gains the confidence, respect, gratitude, affection of the secluded women. They listen to the story of the Great Physician from her lips as with her hands she ministers to their suffering bodies. One hundred and sixty-five million women COLD FACTS and girls at least in India ; thirty-three mil- lions widowed; hundreds of thousands of these of tender years. A million are dedicated to prostitution as temple girls, being “married to the god.” Over ten per- cent of the woman of India are married under ten years of age; over fifty per cent under fifteen. Maternity at about the age of twelve is the common lot. Native medical practice is worse than criminal. Thus far what are the forces ready to combat the appalling conditions involved in these statistics? Under missionary 10 THE NATIVE WOMAN PHYSI CIAN THE KEY TO THE SITUA- TION control there are now at work in India one hundred and fifty-nine Christian women physicians. Can this handful be increased by additional medical mis- sionaries from the West until the whole mass of suffering Hindu womanhood is succored? Impossible. If possible it would be a mistaken goal towards which to strive. The women of India must come to their own aid. For the 20th century, the emphasis must be laid on the native Christian medical woman. The little band of women doctors sent out to India can never by themselves alone touch more than a fringe of the suffering womanhood. This point is now generally conceded. PIONEERS IN As rapidly as possible the native people must MEDICAL learn to stand upon their own feet, and SERVICE emerge from a state of tutelage. There is a note of encouragement to those who seek the salvation of Indian women in the fact that the initial call for medical ministration to Oriental women by those of their own sex came at the suggestion of a Hindu gentleman. In response to this call, in the year 1869, Dr. Clara Swain went to India, the first woman physician known to history to undertake, in the Name of Christ, the practice of medicine among heathen women. But Dr. Swain was not the first medical missionary. That distinction belongs to Dr. John Scudder, a successful young New York City physician, who went to India in 1819 in response to a call for “someone who could combine the quali- ties of missionary and physician.” His name, carried on by his descendants as Christian missionaries, will stand in per- petuity as the founder of medical missions. A thousand years of service in the name of Christ to Christless peoples is the offering, up to this day, of the Scudder family. How does the story of the Scudders bear upon the training of natiW women doctors for India? How can the native girls of India practice VELLORE AND “DOCTOR IDA” me dicine unless they first themselves be taught? How can they be taught without medical schools and teachers? Certain of these native girls have sought training in Europe or in our own county. This is good, but not good enough. The way is very long; the process costly and divisive. The native school on native ground for the training of the native woman in medicine stands out as the imperative need of the hour in India. The government of India is heartily in sympathy with the proposition and has endeavored to meet the need in some of its medical schools for men. Society, however, is not ready for the education of women with men in medical schools and the experiment has been unsuccessful. The government, acknowledging the failure, now turns to the few women doctors under missionary auspices and urges them to proceed with their plans as with them the girls can be more or less sheltered and under high Christian and moral influences dur- ing their period of medical education. A beginning has been made. There are now in working order in India two schools of medicine for women under missionary control, one in the North, at Ludhiana; one in the South at Vellore. Vellore and Ida Scudder, grand-daughter of John Scudder, are one and indivisible. At the centre of the Arcot Mission, in 1896 medical work for women was begun by Dr. Louisa H. Hart. At her instance was initiated a movement for a much-needed separate hospital for women and children. And now we meet one of the third generation of the Scudder family, a personality of rare grace and distinction, — Dr. Ida Scudder. 12 Ida Scudder, as she proceeded with her education in North- field Seminary, had no intention of following in the inherited Scudder line of activity. Indeed, she distinctly decided not to be a missionary, the question naturally confronting one with her grandfather’s blood in her veins. Thus minded, she went to India on a visit to her father and mother in the Arcot Mission, purposing soon to return to the United States and live her own life as if she had not been a Scudder. Surely she had the right so to do. But one day, as Ida Scudder sat in her father’s house, he being away on tour, a Hindu gentleman of high rank came, begging her to come to his young wife, who was in urgent need of surgical aid. The girl explained to the Hindu gentle- man that she was not a physician, as he seemed to imagine, but that if her father, Dr. Scudder, should return in time she would send him. Then the man made it clear to her that it would be impossible for his wife to be treated by a man, she being of high caste. With this he turned away sorrowful. Ida Scudder’s heart burned within her as she felt her help- lessness. Later in the day came another, a low-caste man, begging the girl in the name of all the gods to come to his poor house to save his wife, who was in mortal need. Again she could only refuse. That night from the aristocratic Brahman quarter at one side of the town and from the out-caste hut at the other came the wailing for the dead. The bodies of two young wives and two new-born babies were carried to the burning ground. Ida Scudder knew that night what lay before her. Stronger than her own will was the will of God thus made known to her. She returned to America, entered Cornell Medical School, and twenty-five years ago began her life-work in the new Woman’s Hospital in Vellore, built largely from funds which she had herself raised in the United States. 14 TUC uncDITAI The Mary Taber Schell Hospital under the 1 iltj nUor 1 1 AL ^ ^ . THE NUCLEUS Hutch Reformed Church Board, named for OF THE MEDI- the wife of its chief donor, Robert T. Schell, CAL SCHOOL was opened for patients in 1903 in charge of Dr. Hart and Dr. Ida Scudder, who remains its head. The nurses are native Christian girls, trained in the hospital and taught to minister in Christ’s name to their suffering sisters. Under the strong, sympathetic ministration of Dr. Hart and Dr. Scudder, the success of the Vellore Women’s Hospital has been phenomenal. Now the nucleus of the medical training-school is always the hospital. As time went on the heads of the Vellore Hospital, in view of the crying need for medical training for the native women of the land, found that they must enlarge the scope of their work. The beginning was already made. In the sisterhood of Christian medical women of South India, and in conspicuous degree in Dr. Anna S. Kugler, the veteran Lutheran Missionary of Guntur, Dr. Scudder has found strong and sympathetic support. The Voorhees College for men, under the Dutch Reformed Board, offered powerful co- operation. From its inception in 1913 the new medical school was planned as an interdenominational institution. The Govern- ment of India, clearly recognizing the terrible existing con- ditions, pledged one-half support if six girls should apply as students. The Government also gave a site for the School consisting of two hundred acres, “a whole hill.” On August 13, 1918 the new college was form- FORMAL OPEN- a Uy 0 p ene d by H. E. Lord Pentland, Gov- ernor of Madras Presidency. The Governor was welcomed by Dr. Anna S. Kugler, and presented with a dignified document, a memorial, by Dr. Ida Scudder. It was an occasion of impressive and far-reaching significance, inaugurating a new order of things in South India. 15 Sixty-nine Indian girls applied for entrance REPORT OF J c> r r MADRAS MAIL w ^ en doors of the college opened in August, 1918. In the following year eighty- nine applied, most of whom had to be turned away, because there is no accommodation for them. A copy of the Madras Mail, describes the inspection visit of Governor and Lady Willingdon to this College, and tells us that “this institution had then thirty-eight women pupils undergoing training for sub-assistant surgeoncies. Four of these are Hindus, two Anglo-Indians, and the rest Indian Christians. The school, though it is only in its second year course, has already made its mark,” the report continues, “in the medical educational world.” “Her Excellency, while expressing her gratification at the success attained by the pupils, said she could find work for fifty at once, if they could be got,” the Madras paper goes on to say. “Requisitions have gone forth both to America and Great Britain for more lady doctors as teachers in the school for third and fourth-year classes now established. Over two hundred acres of suitable land have already been acquired by the Government for the Medical School Her Excell- ency carried away with her very pleasant recollections of the work of this school, which is doing a most philanthropic service for a class of Indians for whom medical relief on a scale adequate to the extensive demand is yet to be provided.” Thus we see how Dr. Scudder and a small VELLORE UP TO group of medical women, American and DATE o it > British, in South India, with the encourage- ment of the medical men of South India, have gone forward in the face of tremendous difficulties and have opened the first medical school for women amid a population larger than that of the United States. They secured two women doctors for the faculty the opening year, now reinforced by the coming of Dr. Katherine Scott, formerly resident phy- sician of Vassar College, and by Drs. Jessie and Elizabeth 16 Findlay and Dr. Griscom. Voorhees College for men has welcomed the girl students to its classes in science and to the use of its laboratories. The Mary Taber Schell Hospital, indispensable corner-stone of the institution, is to be housed in a larger and more modern building meeting all Govern- ment requirements. The old building has been sold. Money is needed for the new hospital structure, which must include one hundred and fifty beds. A bequest from the estate of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller supplies the money, fifty thousand dollars, for the main scholastic building which is to house class rooms, offices and laboratory. The first dormitory will be provided by the Tremont Temple Church, Boston. The operating theatre will stand apart from other buildings. Funds for this building have been pledged by a church in Providence, R. I. Money for a chapel has already been pro- vided by Mrs. William Bancroft Hill, who recently visited the college. Doctors’ and nurses’ residences are yet to be con- structed. The Nurses’ Home is to bear the name of Rachel Fillebrown, her father making the gift on the occasion of her marriage, to perpetuate her maiden name. In the congested part of Vellore a dispensary and receiving ward opened by the college authorities are now established. These work in connection with the School and Hospital, patients being kept under observation for a time and serious cases being sent to the Hospital. This ward was given by Ella M. Cole. The first class to complete the Vellore Col- PERSONNEL OF ] e g e c ourse will graduate in 1922 and will STUDENT BODY , • t i ™ j * number approximately 20. The students now number about sixty-five, residing in scattered bungalows in the neighborhood, far or near, of the Hospital. Of these girls few if any have taken full college courses, as indeed it is not needful, perhaps not even desirable, that they should. Time presses and the call is urgent. The majority of the students are High School graduates, while some have taken 17 pre-medical courses at Voorhees College or attended Madras University for two years. Letters and examinations prove these Indian girls studious, earnest, thoughtful, Christian, — good material for the great work to which they have consecrated themselves. In the year 1919 Vellore sent up fourteen girls for the sub-assistants’ examination, all of whom secured passes, four taking their places in the first class, “the school topping the Presidency both in anatomy and chemistry.” ( Madras Mail.) A letter just now received from Dr. Scudder tells of a girl in the junior class who went up a short time since for the Government examination in anatomy. Men students from six medical schools in the Presidency (comparatively numerous, we note, these) took the same examination. The work of our young Vellore candidate was found to outrank all others, an achievement so conspicuous that the Government of India has conferred a gold medal upon her. In 1920 there were one hundred and seventy-eight ap- plicants for admission to the College. Of these, indeed, a number were not sufficiently qualified to enter, but for lack of room only twenty-eight could be received. Accordingly, one hundred and fifty would-be medical workers for the suffering womanhood in South India, their own kin, were turned away, many of them ready and able to enter upon their preparation could the school have received them. Again we say, Time presses and the call is urgent. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them. (The Word of Jesus.) Freshman Class at Vellore Freshman Class at Vellore PRESENT NEEDS OF THE SCHOOL Houses for Doctors and Nurses $25,000 Main Hospital 75,000 Electric Plant 10,000 Water System 15,000 Equipment for Laboratories and Operating Room . . 20,000 Furnishings 10,000 Latest Arrivals at Vellore COOPERATING BOARDS Reformed Church in America Woman's American Baptist Foreign Mission Society Woman’s Board of Missions, Congregational Lutheran Woman’s Board Rev. James L. Barton, D.D., Chair* man of Board of Governors. Rev. W. I. Chamberlain. Ph.D.. Sec- retary and Treasurer, 25 East 22nd Street, New York City.