A Mother Will
Address Her Little Girl, From Whose Foot A Thorn Is To Be Extracted, With,
"Now, Ma, You
Are a woman; a woman does not cry." A man scorns to shed tears.
When we were passing one of
The deep wells in the Kalahari,
a boy, the son of an aged father, had been drowned in it
while playing on its brink. When all hope was gone, the father uttered
an exceedingly great and bitter cry. It was sorrow without hope.
This was the only instance I ever met with of a man weeping in this country.
Their ideas on obstetrics are equally unscientific, and a medical man
going near a woman at her confinement appeared to them more out of place
than a female medical student appears to us in a dissecting-room.
A case of twins, however, happening, and the ointment
of all the doctors of the town proving utterly insufficient
to effect the relief which a few seconds of English art afforded,
the prejudice vanished at once. As it would have been out of the question
for me to have entered upon this branch of the profession - as indeed
it would be inexpedient for any medical man to devote himself exclusively,
in a thinly-peopled country, to the practice of medicine -
I thereafter reserved myself for the difficult cases only,
and had the satisfaction of often conferring great benefits on poor women
in their hour of sorrow. The poor creatures are often placed in a little hut
built for the purpose, and are left without any assistance whatever,
and the numbers of umbilical herniae which are met with in consequence
is very great.
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