ost every Mongol, man and woman and
child, has something that wants putting right. To have studied
medicine at home would have been a great help, but though I cannot
hope now ever to gain a scientific knowledge of the subject, I am
glad that in our hospital here I have a good opportunity of
learning much from Dr. Dudgeon, and all I can do now is to make the
best of this good opportunity. I am told that professional men at
home are suspicious of giving a little medical knowledge to young
men going out as missionaries. I sided with them till I came here,
but here the case is different. At home it is all very well to
stand before the fire in your room, within sight of the brass plate
on the doctor's door on the opposite side of the street, and talk
about the danger of little knowledge; but when you are two weeks'
journey from any assistance, and see your fellow-traveller sitting
silent and swollen with violent toothache for days together, you
fervently wish you had a pair of forceps and the _dangerous_
amount of knowledge. And when in remote places you have the choice
of burying your servant or stopping his diarrh[oe]a, would you
prefer to talk nonsense about professional skill rather than give
him a dose of chlorodyne, even though it should be at the risk of
administering one drop more or less than a man who writes M.D. to
his name would have done?

'I speak earnestly and from experience. No one has more detestation
than I have for the quack that patters in the presence of trained
skill; but from what I have seen and known of mission life, both in
myself and others, since coming to North China, I think it is a
little less than culpable homicide to deny a little hospital
training to men who may have to pass weeks and months of their
lives in places where they themselves, or those about them, may
sicken and die from curable diseases before the doctor could be
summoned, even supposing he could leave his post and come.'

During the summer of 1874 James Gilmour continued his itinerating work
among the nomads of the Plain. He met with much to discourage him, but
he steadily enlarged his knowledge of the people and his acquaintance
with the best methods of work among them. How difficult it was to adapt
ordinary methods of teaching to their habits may be judged from the
following s