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REPORT ON THE WORK OF THE LHASA MEDICAL MISSION, 1936-37.
•
The duties of the Medical Officer to the Lhasa Mission are two-fold—primarily he has to
attend to the Mission Staff and their followers and secondly to minister to the wants of the
local population. In Lhasa there are a few English-speaking Tibetans with a progressive out-
look, and both these, their immediate entourage and the great majority of the inhabitants have
acquired a faith in modern medical methods and generally are only too ready to submit them-
selves for treatment. This has engendered a feeling of confidence in them, that, whenever
a Mission is present in Lhasa, their illness will receive adequate attention ; and it may be said
that one cannot exaggerate the feeling of gratitude, obviously sincere, that is evinced by pati-
ents of all classes. The Te Timpoche—from a purely spiritual standpoint, the senior lama
in Tibet and one whose influence is immense, paid us a compliment worthy of record when he
remarked that “ the poor people tell me you are as kind to them as you are to the rich, and I
am very pleased to hear it.”
The scope offered is wide—Tibetans come from afar for treatment ; time and distance mean
nothing to them and consequently a hospital in Lhasa caters for a large area and huge popula-
tion. There is according to our ideas no qualified medical man in Tibet ; there is a Nepalese
British subject, by vocation a dentist, who does his best to treat the more obvious conditions.
As however the sum total of his knowledge is that which he has derived from us on the occasion
of the present and former Missions, neither his knowledge nor experience can be considered
as other than rudimentary. The Tibetan “ Faculty of Medicine ” has its headquarters in a
little building on a hill above our camp at Dekyi lingka ; it is sponsored by the Tibetan Gov-
ernment and managed by the lamas. During the summer, the lama apprentices arc for the
most part absent gathering herbs on the hillsides : the collecting season being finished they
return and by processes of distillation, ete., extract certain drugs, which they dispense with
prayers during the rest of the year.
One might add that a large proportion of our patients came from the monasteries—the
highest lama in Tibet and also the lowest consulted us ; whether curiosity in some cases or a
belief in us originally prompted their visits one does not know : but the fact remains that to-
wards the end of our stay they gave us a great deal of help and support and were always on the
best of terms with us.
The hospital was a converted barn, approached by one door through a filthy boiler house,
a large part of the roof was open, there were no windows and the furnishings were grossly in-
sufficient and very crude. This building served as an 0. P. Department and housed all our
equipment. There was no means of heating and in the cold weather it required a great deal
of enthusiasm to do one’s work in an atmosphere almost constantly below freezing point.
There was no In-Patient Department as such : what existed was the creation of patients,
who either came from a great d istance or whose disease was so severe as to preclude a daily
visit to us, and was represented by various tents pitched in our grounds near the hospital ;a t
one time about fifteen tents were present, thus representing a total of about thirty In-patients.
Our staff was small but adequate for in addition to the M. 0. we had an S. A. S., the local
dentist, two trained orderlies and a Tibetan lama—apprentice dresser ; the latter was s e n t t o
us at the instigation of prominent Tibetans and with the priestly benediction of the senior
lama-medico. On arrival on the 26th August, we had to fight a three days battle against a
complete inertia on the part of the local authorities, but finally our building was, by our own
efforts, put in a passable condition. Next day, patients appeared in large numbers, at first
approximating to fifty a day, but as the bazar news of our presence became widespread, the
new patients rose to nearly a 100 a day. These were mainly drawn from the lower and middle
classes in Lhasa.
Within a short space of time, one had constant requests from prominent Tibetans to visit
them to attend to their ailments, and soon afterwards the whole day was spent in hospital work
in the morning and the “ City round ” in the afternoon. The Regent and his Staff, the various
Cabinet Ministers, most of the ecclesiastical notables and nearly all the lesser officials c o n s u l t e d
us at some time or other, and it must be said to their credit that they carried out our instruc-
t ions with a complete lack of criticism and an attention to detail that was very gratifying indeed.
Some had minor conditions
easily dealt with in others a more serious state of affairs existed,
which necessitated a lot of visiting, but in all cases they, in their peculiarly charming way ex-
pressed their thanks and, accompany ing these latter with presents, often left the recipient in
a very embarrased state of mind indeed. Rai Sahib Bo Tsering, our S. A. S., and a past visitor
to Lhasa, on many occasions has shown surprise at the amount of outside visiting done, saying
it has been far greater in volume than on any past occasion.
There is a moderate amount of ophthalmic work and amongst the items of particular medical
interest are the cases of cataract blindness, who appear from all directions : the majority of
patients are elderly monks and up to February 17th, 33 enucleations (lens extractions) were
performed, of which 31 were completely successful. One may note that our first case came