lviii
SUB-ASSISTANT SURGEONS AS SUPERINTENDENTS OF VACCINATION.
readily. This mere indifference is one of the most difficult forms of opposition to overcome,
and to combat it successfully a thorough knowledge of the people, perseverance, and firmness
are requisite.
Besides this, on the Superintendent devolves the management of considerable numbers of
vaccinators, and the task of keeping them all contented and providing that each of them
gives a full quantity of work, requires the exercise of the powers of a mind trained to
business habits.
The duties of a Superintendent necessitate his being constantly on the move. He is
unable to have any fixed residence, and cannot even for a week take a lodging in any village
in which the vaccinators are working. As soon as the week's work of one gang of vaccinators
has been inspected, he has work waiting for him among another gang, and two or three days
at most are all that can be spent in any one place. This perpetual movement, entailing, as it
does, absence from their families and separation from their friends, is necessarily most distaste-
ful and in many cases proves so unbearable as to lead those thus employed to throw up the
public service, rather than submit to the life to which they are subjected by remaining in it.
Young men unable to perform such duties.
3. Considering the onerous nature of the duties required of them, it does not seem
difficult to understand how young Sub-Assistant Sur-
geons find themselves quite unable to overcome the
obstacles they every day meet with, and are lost in despair at finding they have been sent to
persuade people to be vaccinated who will not listen to them ; that the vaccinators placed
under them are unruly and that they cannot exercise an effective control over them ; while the
life of isolation and hardship is one which is quite unendurable to them.
Superintendents should have been some time in
the public service.
4. The decision of character and powers of persuasion necessary to constitute a Sub-
Assistant Surgeon a successful Superintendent of
Vaccination are rarely met with in any one under
thirty years of age. A youth fresh from college,
however able he may be in answering examination papers, is so ignorant of how to transact
any business matter, that he is unfit for the responsibilities of a Vaccine Superintendent.
By the experience of the world gained while in the junior grades of the public service,
he improves much, and the general training he receives while thus serving assists him mate-
rially should he ever be required to take charge of a Vaccine Establishment.
It is difficult to judge how a young man will turn out after leaving college and whether
he will be possessed of the steady application to his duties, without which he will prove
worthless as a Superintendent of Vaccination, while after having been under observation
for a few years his capacity for real work can be more correctly estimated. While making a
requisition on the Head of the Medical Department for Sub-Assistant Surgeons to fill up
vacancies in the Vaccine Department, it is stipulated that those he nominates, besides being
men of known character, should belong to the second grade, and thus be between seven and
fourteen years' service, and that they should have served in the Punjab. To the last require-
ment considerable importance is attached, as absence from Bengal and employment at a dis-
tance from their houses is found to give an amount of self-reliance and a power of putting up
with much that is not pleasant which it is difficult to obtain in those who have never left their
native province.
Superintendents should receive special staff pay.
5. A great mistake has been made and is still sometimes committed in supposing that
any Sub-Assistant Surgeon will accept the bare pay
of his rank for performing the duties required of
him as a Superintendent of Vaccination. The work which he is obliged to perform is many
times harder than that required of him while serving in any other position, while the dis-
heartening effect of a never ending dealing with people who throw obstacles in his way, has no
equivalent in any other appointment which he could hold.
The self abnegation required of separation from family and friends which is not neces-
sitated to the same degree in the other appointments open to him, and the discomfort of hav-
ing always to be on the move, must also be met by sufficient remuneration.
Besides all of these, however, there is another element which must always be borne in
mind and which also in itself necessitates increased allowances. Duties of whatever nature
which call for the exercise of individual energy, individual judgment and individual discretion,