the Koreans and Chinese used before the arrival of the
missionaries.

"Do you see these needles?" an American surgeon in Korea asked me one
day, as he pointed to about a hundred of the most horrible looking
copper and brass needles lying on a stand.

"Yes," I admitted, mystified.

"I have taken every one of them out of the bodies of human beings on
whom I have operated here in the hospital."

"Where did you find them?"

"In between the bowels, in the muscles, in the organs of the body, and
one in the heart of a man who came to me because he couldn't breathe
very well."

"No wonder the fellow couldn't breathe. I don't think I could myself if
I had a needle in my blood-pump!" I said with a smile.

"These fancy needles that the old Korean doctors thought a good deal of
they put a handle on," he continued.

"What was that for?"

"So they wouldn't lose their needles in a body. The other, or common
needles, they just stuck into the body wherever the wound or sore place
was and left them there."

"And what, may I ask, was the idea of this playful Korean surgery! Was
it something like our 'button, button, whose got the button?'"

"No, the idea was that there were devils in the wound. If it was a
swelling there was a devil in that swelling. If it was typhoid fever,
and there was pain in the bowels, there was a devil in the inward parts
affected, and so, after carefully sterilizing the needle by running it
through his long, black, greasy hair, the native doctor would run it
into the affected part of the body to kill the devil or let it escape
from the body."

"The old idea of a fear religion, a fear social life, a fear family life
and a fear surgery prevails in Korea as it does in China?" I said by way
of a question.

"It prevails everywhere in the Orient. To me it is the most awful thing
about working out here. The awful sense of constant fear that is on the
people always and everywhere."

Pounded-up claws of a tiger; the red horn of a deer; pulverized fish
bones; roots of trees, pigs' eyes; and a thousand poisons and
fear-remedies make up the medical history of the Oriental doctor.

"Why do they kill girl babies?"

"Fear!"

"Fear of what?"

"Fear of devils! The devils will be displeased if a girl baby is born.
Therefore kill the baby.

"Throw the babies out on the ground in the graveyards. Let the dogs eat
the babies."

I heard the dogs howling in a cemetery one night about two o'clock in
the morni