The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1930, Page 9

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

York, and seemingly has not much love lost for
Jimmy. He was brought up by his grandmother
in Meherrin and has apparently not seen many good
days. Food was never overabundant in those parts
of old Virginny, and beans and fatback were too
heavy for James when he was a small boy. His
physical growth has been stunted. But he has
a clever head on his frail body. And in that head
there are two eyes as clear and sparkling as
crystals. And under that old, but clean, though
sometimes torn, shirt, size sixteen, beats a heart
that knows its Savior and loves Him.

Friends, here are two boys worthy of your loving
consideration.

Immanuel Lutheran College,

Greensboro, N. C. H. Nav.

The Great Need of Medical Missionaries.

We read in a recent issue of the Lutheran Wit-
ness that after years of praying and waiting our
mission in India is going to have a female medical
doctor in the person of Miss Bohnsack, M. D., who
sailed for India on Thanksgiving Day.

How great the need is for medical missionaries
the kind reader may learn from the following
items : —

“In a Korean mission hospital I saw a girl of
sixteen with a frightfully swollen jaw. It was
caused by a native doctor’s piercing it with a big
flat needle to drive out a demon that had made the
tooth to ache. The needle, being the same with
which he had been piercing all manner of tumors
and ulcers, of course infected the jaw, causing ex-
treme agony, and resulting in necrosis of the jaw-
bone, a considerable part of which our doctor told
me he would have to remove. In the same hospital
I found a young man suffering tortures with his
leg, which the native doctor had pierced to expel the
demon and from which our doctor was preparing to
remove several inches of dead bone. This piercing
is a common medical practise in the Far East, and
those two patients represent tens of thousands who
at’ this hour are being tortured and maimed and
many of them killed, poor victims of heathen super-
stition. Some of the native modes of treating
various common female troubles are frightful and
agonizing beyond expression.” (Smith, “The Desire
of all Nations.”)

The same writer reports the following: “Sitting
one day in a little mud hut in Equatorial “Africa,
far from any doctor or hospital, I saw a curious ob-

ject coming down the long path on three feet, with
the strangest mixture of a hobble, a hop, and a crawl
that I ever beheld. As it drew slowly nearer, I saw
it was a native woman in the prime of life, of good
figure and kindly face, going on both hands and
one foot, while one leg seemed crooked and helpless.
The moment she came up to us, she rolled over on
her side and lay there flat on the ground, exhausted.
We found that on the soft underside of the knee,
where every move would be torture, was one of those
terrible African ulcers, as large as one’s whole hand,
covered with a plaster of earth nearly an inch thick,
a heathen medical treatment. I can never forget
the eager eyes of mingled pain and hope she turned

“up to us from the ground. Nor can I forget how

the hope died out and only the pain remained as we
told her we could do nothing. After panting a while
on the ground, she rolled over on her face, lifted
herself on her hands and one foot, and started her
agonizing crawl back to her little mud hut, possibly
a mile away, there to die a lingering painful death
of something that medical treatment could cure.
Such cases I could multiply indefinitely. The pang
of them remains with me.”

Why is it that Christian young men and women,
trained for medical and nursing service and not
held in this country by any sort of providential
circumstances, stay in this country with its thou-
sands of doctors and nurses and hospitals and turn
a deaf ear to the dire and distressing needs of the
non-Christian world? How do they explain their
action to the Lord of Love, whose disciples they
claim to be? F.J.L.

~<a

The Unanswered Cry for Help.

One of the most pathetic features of mission-
work in many fields is the inability of the mission-
aries to answer the calls that come to them. At one
station in the Belgian Congo, for example, there is
an average of two delegations every week the year
round from villages near by and far off asking for
teachers and missionaries. When, as is so often the
case, the missionaries are compelled to tell them
they have no one to send, they come back with the
sad question, “How long must we wait?” and then
go on to tell that in their villages are many old
people who cannot afford to wait very long.

Here is what a missionary says: “Some of the
saddest moments of my live have been, when these
men have asked for help, to have to say to them that
we have no teacher, no preacher, prepared to tell
them the Word of Life. Sometimes they said: “We