The Heroic Treatment.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 866, 5 October 1888, Page 9

The Heroic Treatment.

HOW THE JAPANESE CURE DISEASE BT BURNING. While we lunched in the open quadrangle before the temple (says a Japanese correspondent) groups of cheery Japanese came m, ohattering aa gaily as any picnickers could wish to, took off their straw sandals, washed their feet, and disappeared in jolly parties to the interior of the temple. When we dropped our shoes, and followed to the one upper room, we found our jolly chatterers all there, sitting in rows with their faces to the wall. All were stripped to the waist, and the old priest made marks on their backs in sacred characters to indicate where the moxa should be burned. Following him came a small boy with a lamp of what appeared to be very sticky dough in one hand. With dexterous fingers this youngster pinched off a bit of dough, rolled it into a small cone and stuokitover the priest’s mark. After him came a staid, stoical, youngster, who, in the most cold-blooded way, touched a match to the tip of the moxa cone, and went down the lines giving lights. It burned without Same, a slow, red glow like charcoal consuming the cone down to the flesh, where it sizzled and smoked for a few seconds, that must have seemed years to the victims* Searing with a red-hot iron would be a quick and humane treatment compared to this slow, eating fire of the moxa. The men and women that I watched for the few minutes that I could endure it, stood it heroically, but by the tension of every muscle in their backs and arms, one could judge of their agony. ■ One old man folded his arms, bent his head over, and indulged in suppressed chuckles that varied with groans and hysterical ha ! ha 1 ha’s ! A woman buried her face in a blue cotton towel, and made no sign or movement, while two moxa cones were burning down and into her flesh. A young man started to rook to and fro when the fire began entering into his bones, but soon Btopped, bracing himself, and sat motionless. The priest having set his seal on his victims, sat down by a brazier, pat on his big spectacles, and was soon lost in reading a pious book, wholly indifferent to the backs frizzling beside him. This Mine priest has some secret of composition for his moxa dough that haa kept it in favour for many years, and about the only revenue of the temple is from his patient’s fees. For rheumatism, lumbago, and such aches and ills it is moat- beneficial, and gives quick relief to anyone able to.endure it. The Japanese resort to moxa for almost everything that ails them, and one sees coolies with their backs and the calves of their legs covered with moxa scars. Foreign doctors have discovered the virtues of the treatment for certain things, and in Baris many cases of paralysis have been successfully treated, Charles Sumner having been one of the famous cases of whose paralysed nerves revived by the moxa. A variation of the treatment, used in Paris under the name of moxa, consists in burning with white-hot irons, which iB much less painful than with paste cones, and Clara

Morris was one of the beat advertised sub« jects undergoing the white moxa. When the patients descended from the naoxa room, put on their sandals, and muttered a sullen prayer toward the open door of the temple, they were hardly to be identified with the gay people who had arrived earlier ; and when they walked, it was plain by the way 'they held their shoulders that the raw places still smarted.