56 
IV. JULY, 1913— JANUARY, 1914 
in the evening before. The man, whose name was 
Ai'nda, begged me to operate, for, like all the natives, he 
knew well enough the dangers of his condition. There 
was, in fact, no time to lose, and the instruments were 
brought together as quickly as possible. Mr. Christol 
allowed me to use his boys’ bedroom as an operating 
theatre ; my wife undertook to give the anaesthetic, 
and a missionary acted as assistant. Everything went 
off better than we could have expected, but I was 
almost staggered by the quiet confidence with which the 
man placed himself in position on the operating table. 
A miUtary doctor from the interior, who is going to 
Europe on leave, tells me that he envies me the excellent 
assistance I had for my first operation on hernia ! He 
himself, he said, had performed his with one native 
prisoner handing him the instruments and another 
administering the chloroform by guesswork, while each 
time they moved the fetters on their legs rattled ; but 
his regular assistant was ill and there was no one who 
could take his place. 
The aseptic precautions were, naturally, far from 
perfect, but the patient recovered. 
January 10th, 1914. I had scarcely finished writing 
the above paragraphs this afternoon when I had to 
hurry off to the landing place. Mrs. Faure, the wife 
of the missionary at N’Gomo, arrived in a motor boat, 
suffering from a severe attack of malaria, and I had 
scarcely given her a first intramuscular injection of 
quinine when a canoe brought in a young man who 
had had his right thigh broken and badly mutilated by 
a hippopotamus in Lake Sonange. In other respects, 
too, the poor fellow was in a bad condition. He and a 
friend had gone out together to fish, but not far from 
