TEE RACE FIBER OF TEE CEIXESE 405 



In the south where foot binding is not prevalent the women bear 

 their children very easily, with little outcry, and are expected to be up 

 in a day or two. Dr. Swan, of Canton, testifies that more than once on 

 calling for a sampan to take him across the river he has been asked to 

 wait a quarter or a half hour. By that time the mistress of the boat 

 would have given birth to the child, laid it in a corner among some 

 rags and be ready to row him across. In childbirth the woman attended 

 by a dirty old mid-wife in a filthy hovel escapes puerperal fever under 

 conditions that would certainly kill a white woman. In cases of dif- 

 ficult birth when after a couple of days the white physician, is called in 

 and removes the dead infant, the woman has some fever but soon 

 recovers. The women, moreover, are remarkably free from displace- 

 ments and other troubles peculiar to the sex. 



Living in a super-saturated, man-stifled land, profoundly ignorant 

 of the principles of hygiene, the masses have developed an immunity 

 to noxious microbes which excites the wonder and envy of the foreigner. 

 They are not affected by a mosquito bite that will raise a large lump 

 on the lately come foreigner. They can use contaminated water from 

 canals without incurring dysentery. There is very little typhoid and 

 what there is is so attenuated that it was long doubted to be typhoid. 

 The fact was settled affirmatively only by laboratory tests. All physi- 

 cians agree that among the Chinese smallpox is a mild disease. One 

 likened it to the mumps. Organic heart trouble, usually the result of 

 rheumatic faver, is declared to be very rare. 



It is universally remarked that in taking chloroform the Chinese 

 rarely pass through an excited stage, but go off very quietly. From 

 after nausea they are almost wholly free. One physician of twenty- 

 five years' practise has never had a death from chloroform, although he 

 has not administered ether half a dozen times. The fact is, however, 

 they stolidly endure operations which we would never perform without 

 an anesthetic. Small tumors are usually thus removed and in extract- 

 ing teeth gas is never administered. Sometimes extensive cutting — 

 e. g., the removal of a tumor reaching down into and involving the 

 excision of the decayed end of a rib — is borne without flinching. Only 

 three physicians interviewed had failed to remark the insensibility of 

 their patients to pain. Here, perhaps, is the reason why no people in 

 the world have used torture so freely as the Chinese. This bluntness 

 of nerve, however, does not appear to be universal. The scholars, who 

 usually neglect to balance their intense brain work with due physical 

 exercise, are not stoical. The meat-eating and wine-bibbing classes 

 lack the insensibility of the vegetarian, non-alcoholic masses. The self- 

 indulgent gentry who shun all activity, bodily or mental, and give them- 

 selves up to sensual gratification, are very sensitive to pain and very 

 fearful of it. Some make the point, therefore, that the oft-noted dull- 



