66 ■ IV. JULY, 1913— JANUARY. 1914 
who for a year and a half had had a piece of necrosed 
bone, as long as his hand, projecting from his leg below 
the knee. It was a case of osteomyelitis, and the 
pus secreted stank so horribly that no one could stay 
near him for long. The boy himself was reduced to a 
skeleton, but now he is fat and healthy and is beginning 
to walk again. 
Hitherto all my operations have been successful, and 
that raises the confidence of the natives to a pitch that 
almost terrifies me. What impresses them most of all is 
the anaesthetics, and they talk a great deal about them. 
The girls in our school exchange letters with those in a 
Sunday school at home, and in one of them there was 
the following piece of news : “ Since the Doctor came 
here we have seen the most wonderful things happen. 
First of all he kills the sick people ; then he cures them, 
and after that he wakes them up again.” For 
anaesthesia seems to the native the same thing as being 
dead, and similarly if one of them wants to make me 
understand that he has had an apoplectic fit, he says : 
" I was dead.” 
There are sometimes patients who try to show their 
gratitude. The man who in August was freed from a 
strangulated hernia collected 20 francs among his 
relations, “ in order to pay the Doctor for the expensive 
thread with which he sewed up my belly.” 
An uncle of the boy with the sores on his feet, a 
joiner by trade, put in fourteen days’ work for me 
making cupboards out of old boxes. 
A black trader offered me his labourers in order that 
the roof of my house might be put in order in good time 
before the rains. 
Another came to see me and thank me for having 
