| caption: |
expedition in the Tangkhul area |
| caption: |
common diseases and dispensary work |
| text: |
Photography was no strain. The actual dispensary work was not hard; but the rough conditions and the numbers who flocked to us made it so. The crowd of patients was generally marshalled by a headman, but it always pressed in as close to us as it could, a tight ring of bare, brown, unwashed bodies, all wriggling and jostling to be the next for attention. Scabies, worms and malaria were the chief troubles, but coughs and bronchitis ran them pretty close. Then there were septic wounds and ulcers, often of horrible size. There were minor operations - lancing abscesses and extracting teeth - and sometimes a lady who had to take me aside and tell me all about it in Tangkhul before she could be coaxed along to the compounder. In wayside villages it was much the same, except that the medicines had to be set out on a bench, a woodstack, or the ground, and it was one long battle to keep the flies and dust off them. |
