The people of the Philippines, their religious progress and preparation for spiritual leadership in the Far East,

422 THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES

medical missionary never forgets that he is a doctor of morals
as well as of bodies.
Some of the mission doctors have won great reputations
for themselves by heroic operations performed when other doctors valued their reputations too highly to run the risk. Since
there is a superstitious dread of operations and of hospitals,
sufferers do not often come until the diseases have reached
an advanced stage. Even then the doctor must frequently use
some other word than "operation" if he wishes to do anything
with the patient. The most common of these operations are
obstetrical. Women are rushed into the hospitals after midwives have subjected them to terrible torture in an effort to
deliver. A common method employed by midwives is to
place a heavy weight on the abdomen of the parturient woman,
a practice denounced by physicians as exceedingly dangerous
both to mother and baby. Sometimes the poor mothers are
already dying, almost always they are in grave danger. It
is wonderful what a high percentage of mothers and babies
are saved under these conditions.
After a few signal successes the reputation of the doctor
is made. One surgeon became so popular that people came
flocking to him for operations for all kinds of amazing ailments. One desired his intestine opened to let the air out;
another wanted his head opened to release a little demon
which was boring in that section. Dr. Floyd O. Smith, of
Cagayan, Misamis, found an unusually large number of people
afflicted with hair lip. At first he experienced some difficulty
in inducing the victims of this disfigurement to submit to an
operation, but he persistently searched for willing patients until
his reputation was made, and now every person with a hair lip
on the north coast of Mindanao knows that he can be given
an almost perfect cure at a very reasonable cost. Nothing
that Dr. Smith could have done would have proven such eloquent advertising of his skill as a surgeon.
PUERICULTURE
The Mary J. Johnson Hospital in Manila, under the direction of Dr. Rebecca Parish, is devoted entirely to women and