OPERATIONS. GRATITUDE OF PATIENTS 65 
first ! However, at present we manage to get off with 
two or three operations a week. For more than this 
my wife would be unable to manage the necessary 
preparations and the cleaning and putting away of the 
instruments afterwards ; nor should I be equal to the 
work. I have often to operate in the afternoon when 
I have been busy till one o’clock or even later with 
bandaging and examination ; and in this land one cannot 
take so much upon one as in a more temperate climate. 
That Joseph can allow himself to collect the vessels 
with blood in them after an operation and to wash the 
instruments, is a sign of very high enlightenment. An 
ordinary negro will touch nothing that is defiled with 
blood or pus, because it would make him unclean in 
the religious sense. In many districts of Equatorial 
Africa it is difficult, or even impossible, to persuade 
the natives to let themselves be operated on, and why 
those on the Ogowe even crowd to us for the purpose, 
I do not know. Their readiness is probably connected 
with the fact that some years ago an army doctor, 
Jorryguibert by name, stayed some time with the 
District Commandant at Lambarene, and performed a 
series of successful operations. He sowed, and I am 
reaping. 
Not long ago I got a rare case of injury to operate on, 
for which many a famous surgeon might envy me. It 
was a case of strangulated hernia which protruded 
under the ribs, the so-called lumbar hernia. There 
was every imaginable complication present, and when 
darkness fell I had not finished ; for the final sutures 
Joseph had to hold the lamp for me. But the patient 
recovered. 
Much notice was attracted by an operation on a boy 
