HOW DOCTORS DIFFER.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 11664, 24 January 1902, Page 3

HOW DOCTORS DIFFER.

IS CLEANLINESS NECESSARY TO HEALTH.

An amusing discussion between doctors and Anglo-Indians arose the other dayout of an innocent paper on Indian Sanitation, addressed to the National Indian Association meeting in the Imperial Institute, London. Dr Dhringa, a Hindu who has taken his M.D. degree in Edinburgh, spoke as an. enthusiastic sanitarian, and urged expensive reforms in the direction ( of pure water and a better drainage sys- : tern being introduced into India. He remembered, however, that the problem of sanitation is really a problem of poverty; and proposed that the gospel of cleanliness should be spread by itinerant lecturers with magic lanterns;and none, he thought, could better undertake this work than religious missionaries, who appeal primarily to the most approachable side of the character—the emotional. In commenting upon these proposed reforms, Sir George Birdwood, K.C.1.E.,. who presided, expressed the view that in India the disease-attacked man was endangered not so much by the virulence of his complaint as by the climate, which gave.no chance of rallying. India's chief hope, then, lay in more effective nursing. They should not, however, lose sight of the*fact" that the Indians had their own methods of cure, in which it was as well to let the people indulge. He then detailed, amid laughter, two amusing anecdotes against himself, of how a patient of his lay on the point of death, who had exhausted every modern civilised prescription bearing on his complaint, and another whose leg he was about to amputate but for the protests of the patient, were both, cured by native priests. Surgeon-Major Ince considered modern sanitation and sanitary inspectors one of the greatest plagues of the age. Healthfulness was personal cleanliness. Look at the persecution people had inflicted upon them in regard to water. Yet was there a drop of pure water on the face of God's earth? No, even rain water was not pure. This proved it was not necessary. Not a few doctors flourished through that bundle of fallacies called sanitation. Dr Forbes Ross then fell foul of personal cleanliness, as an assurance of health and immunity from disease, and told how many years ago in a Yorkshire mining village* he, having been vaccinated, undertook to" keep dirty for three months while tending his smallpox patients. He touched

no water, except to drink it, did not change his clothes even at night —the miners setting a watch upon him. He spent the most horrible three months he had ever experienced, but he proved his point.