I
was amazed to see the work that the doctor did.
From early morning people started coming to the hospital. By eight o’clock there was a crowd waiting. Before the doctor began work the hospital
“chaplain” (usually one of the African staff) lead a service and talked to the
people. Then the “dresser” gave “shooks” (injections) previously ordered by the doctor, took
care of many other things, and then began to call the people in four or Dr. Silver and Ernest Kroma
at work
five at a time, to the
office. Of necessity the doctor
gave very little time to each
patient, but twenty years of experience had enabled her often to tell at a glance what was wrong with the patient.
There were as many as two hundred
to four hundred patients at the clinic every day.
My part of the work was in the
laboratory, of course. I did
examinations for intestinal parasites, urine analyses, some blood counts,
smears for gonorrhea and T.B. Later, as we were able to expand the lab and
I began to train a young man to help me, we were able to expand our work. Every time I looked in the microscope I was
thankful for the four months I had in England studying parasitology. Parasitology was
quite rewarding–instead of being rare to find anything, as is usual in the
States, it was rare not to find anything there. Almost everyone had hookworm or roundworm, or both. In addition, some had tapeworm and other
intestinal parasites. We had occasional
patients from other parts of Sierra Leone with bilharzia
( schistosomiasis),
filariasis
(elephantiasis) and sleeping sickness. There was lots of tuberculosis. I always had a sinking feeling when I found
the organism, for it was almost certainly a sentence of death in those first
years. (Later, some new medications were
discovered, which did help a number of
people.) When our leprosy clinic was
opened, I also did skin snips for leprosy, and later still, for onchocerciasis,
which causes so much blindness.
Then there were the accidents–in
the first months of our arrival in Rotifunk a man was
brought in who had been attacked by a leopard.
His companion, also a hunter, was killed. When this man heard his cries, he went to the
rescue, but was mauled in several places and had a broken arm and a thumb that
was almost cut off by a knife of one of his rescuers. We had no surgeon at that time, but Dr.
Silver managed to take care of him and he recovered.
A more pitiful case was a man who
fell from a tree and broke his back.
This meant that he was completely paralyzed from his waist down. There was nothing that could be done for such
cases at that time. To make matters
worse, his friends had used “country” medicine on him before he was brought to
our hospital four days after the accident.
Their treatment was to dig a deep pit and build a fire in it. Then the fire was scraped out and the victim
put in it and buried in the pit up to his neck.
Because the man had no feeling from his waist down, he was terribly
burned. The doctor kept him in the hospital
for almost two weeks, but saw the signs of death setting in. Evidently his family did, too, for they asked
to take him away. They always wanted to
die at home; so the doctor let him go.
We heard that he died the next day, and at the native “inquest”
they found his trouble had been caused
by witches! I asked Ernest Kroma, our dresser, why they should think that when they
knew he had broken his back. Ernest
answered, “But, you see, they think it is the witch that caused him to fall.”
A month’s report (February 1951)
showed the work the one doctor did. She
saw a total of 5,346 patients in 28 days, plus 37 inpatients. Gertrude Bloede
conducted the weekly baby clinics, at which there were 685 babies (four
clinics). Treatments were given for
yaws, malaria, rheumatism, worms, skin ulcers,
respiratory diseases, skin diseases, gonorrhea, dysentery and diarrhea,
leprosy, elephantiasis, syphilis, tuberculosis and
wounds–in the order of the numbers treated.
(Actually, there was no treatment for elephantiasis or tuberculosis, but
that was the reason the patients came to the doctor.) There were also 237 cases labeled “miscellaneous.” (In addition, Gertrude no
doubt delivered a number of babies, and held
prenatal clinics [antenatal,
in British terminology], but I have no record of those, nor of the number of
lab tests I did. I do have a note that
in April of 1952 I did 1,065 laboratory examinations on 773 patients.)
When the doctor once questioned a man as to why he brought his
child to us and passed up another hospital, he said, “Yes, they have medicine
there, but they don’t care about people; and when they don’t care about people,
the medicine doesn’t have power.”
When I saw the crowds of people
day after day, many of them with very terrible ulcers and diseases, I was
reminded of the verse which says, “So
His fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those
afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and
paralytics, and He healed them.”