A New Charter For India THERE has lately been a
remarkable sequel to Mother India, the book in which Miss Katherine Mayo championed the cause of her suffering sisters in India, but made so little mention of the medical missions and other reforming movements that have been active there for a generation or more. (One need only recall the campaign of the late Marchioness of Dufferin in favour of women-doctors for Indian women—which moved Mr. Kipling to one of his most human poems—and in our own day the speeches of the Maharajah of Burdwan and others, advocating a higher standard of training for India's medical students, women especially.) • A distinguished member of the Indian Medical Service, Lieut.-Colonel J. J. Harper-Nelson, has now taken up the question of reforming the reactionary native systems known as the Ayurvedic and Unani methods of medical training, responsible for a host of native vaids and hakims, by weeding out unauthorized and half-qualified prac- titioners, and bringing up to date and something like Western standards the cures they employ.•
" Men and women and children (he writes) are condemned to suffering, and often to death, because untrained and ignorant men are permitted to undertake their treatment. . . . The vaids and bakims do not know the rudiments of clinical diagnosis. They do not know one end of a microscope from another. They cannot use a stethoscope or other scientific instrument of precision."
Ideas, in short, which are " dead as the dodo " sway the lives and health of ninety per cent. of a population amounting to more than three hundred millions, with terrible effects on mortality returns, and untold suffering to the dying and the survivors. This is the gist of the Lieut-Colonel's indictment as published in Mr. Kipling's old paper, the Civil and Military Gazette, of Lahore, an organ that has returned to its old record for undertaking causes that make for progress rather than popularity. Nor has this salutary campaign lacked enlightened- native support. Dr. M. R. Sawhney, a well-known Indian medical man with a Cambridge degree, has come forward with flagrant instances of maltreatment by the use of ." cures " of the most discredited kind ; and hardly a day passes, he adds, " without our coming across cases which have suffered terribly at the hands of hakims and vaids." There is another factor of importance advanced by the Lahore paper as a reason for legislative regulation. This is the damaging effect that neglect of medical supervision has upon local sanitation—a department of public welfare which has always been a sore point between the authorities and the people. It urges, and rightly, that however back- ward the uninstructed classes of India may be, there should be a higher standard of thought and responsibility among the higher social grades. One of the gravest heads of indictment against " Dr. Dodo," as the typical delinquent is styled, is the ease with which any unqualified person may set up anywhere in India as an apothecary or dispenser, and make a livelihood by dealing in poisons, as well as in inferior and adulterated drugs. Lately the Bombay Chamber of Merchants came forward with an important rescript showing how the pharmaceutical industry of India has long been affected by this uncontrolled traffic in drugs with no legal check whatever, and no obligatory standard to which such people have to conform: What is worse, there is no pretence that evasion of the moral obligation of quality ,is confined to Indian dealers. Part of the blame lies indeed with British and Continental firms who
" are known to make a practice of wilfully adulterating their goods for shipment to India in response to the trade demand for such goods.'
ThOse who have read Conrad's story, -The. Shadow. Line, Fill realize what .it means to inflict' hogus: remedies or worthless substitutes for quinine on patients at the mercy of that most wretched of maladies, malaria ; and will understand what it means when even India's moderate regulations of trade are defied by insertion of the letters " C 0 " (meaning " compound ") as a pretended certificate of specification on packets of chemical stuff, thus lulling the uninitiated buyer into a sense of false security. These worthless commodities are bought wholesale by public hospitals and municipal charities for distribution, and thus, while public money is thrown away, benevolence and public spirit are turned to mockery. To show that the fraud has long been known and exposed, there have been three occasions in the past few years when draft Bills have been presented to the Legislative Assembly or else to individual members, and only eighteen months ago the Council of State called on the provincial legislatures to consider a Bill on the subject. We are still at a loss to know what has resulted by way of remedy. Fever accounts for the terrible figure of 4,000,000 deaths per year in India, and the majority of these victims die by malaria. Some weeks ago Colonel H. A. J. Gidney, president of the Anglo-Indian and Domiciled European Association—himself a medical man and an expert in this field of research—raised at Simla the question of the need for public action, and proved beyond dispute how this traffic in " faked " drugs is working havoc throughout the country. It was shown that his motion embodied views which have at various times been officially expressed by responsible trade commissioners, public health bodies, science colleges, chambers of commerce, and, above all, by the Council of State, which voiced long ago the need for a Food and Drugs Act for India and a systematic course of training for pharmacists. One high-minded class of native practitioner, as repre- sented by the Principal of the Dayanand Ayurvedic College and by chiefs of similar institutions, has come forward to strengthen the present exposure of the real offenders—those false vaids and hakints who buy and sell bogus diplomas, and use so-called remedies dictated by a stale tradition or coined by their own imagination. Some of these are of too nauseous a character to appear in Western print, and seem to be contrived so that their very hideousness shall coerce the victim into submission by astonishment. It is for the sake of public interest and the rescue of helpless millions of our fellow-subjects that the matter has been so conrageously ventilated, and the immediate wel- fare or otherwise of a host of impostors is altogether beside the mark. It remains to be seen whether the Government of India will direct the Provincial Councils to undertake the required investigation in their own areas, and then in default, proceed to take the necessary action for liberating a long-suffering people from a wholesale system of fraud, torture, and iniquity.
J. P. COLLINS
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