ess or lancing a gum.

The women all claim a greater or less knowledge of such surgery and
medicine as they think necessary for them. After one of the village
frays, when the warriors come back to their homes more or less cut
and wounded, the women of the household at once set about their
treatment. If there is severe haemorrhage some oil is quickly raised
to boiling-point in a saucepan, and either poured into the wound,
or if, for instance, a limb has been cut off, the bloody stump is
plunged into the oil. This, no doubt, acts as an effective, though
somewhat barbarous, haemostatic. If the bleeding is only slight,
a certain plant gathered from the jungle is reduced to ashes, and
these ashes rubbed on the wound. In the case of a clean cut the
women draw out hairs from their own head, and sew it up with their
ordinary sewing-needles, and I have sometimes seen flesh wounds which
have been quite skilfully sewn up in this way. They are less skilful
in the application of splints. In most neighbourhoods there is some
village carpenter who prides himself on his skill in the application
of splints to broken bones; but in most cases he bandages them too
tightly, or with too little knowledge of the circulation of the limb,
so that not a year passes in which we do not get one or more cases
of limbs which have become gangrenous after quite simple fractures
through this kind of treatment.

Almost the only drugs which are used to any extent in Afghanistan
are purgatives, and especially those of a more violent and drastic
nature. Nearly every Afghan thinks it necessary to be purged or bled,
or both, every spring, and not unfrequently at the fall of the year
too. Scarcely any illness is allowed to go to a week's duration without
the trial of some violent purge. Sometimes the purge is given with so
little regard to its quantity and the vitality of the patient that it
results in rapid collapse and death. In other cases a latent dysentery
is excited, which may result in an illness lasting many months,
and leaving the patient permanently weakened thereby. The seasonal
blood-lettings are performed, as in the West, from the bend of the arm,
this position having, no doubt, come down to the practitioners of both
East and West from the ancient Greeks; but in the case of illness,
while the physicians of the West have had their practice revolutionized
by modern ideas of anatomy and physiology, those of the East still
follow the humoral and hypo