SUPERSTITION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1102, 29 May 1913, Page 4

SUPERSTITION.

Examples of ignorance and superstitions of an extraordinary nature were freely made use of by Dr. John Kirk, who delivered recently in New Plymouth an address, Dr. Kirk is a young graduate of Edinburgh University, and he has established a successful hospital in one of the villages of Canton, in whose great plain over a million people are living, mostly in dirt and squalor. "We New Zealanders.” said Dr. Kirk, "don’t like talking about superstitions, and to get examples of it, we have to look for it in out-of-the-way corners. But in China, superstition is everywhere, for the country is soaked, steeped and saturated in it. ‘ Day

after day, I have worked in the hospital, and it is superstition that has become a dead weight on my back. Where has it come from ? There is only one answer, and that is ignorance. There is only one way I know of to get rid of superstition, and that is to educate. You know now, why I believe in mission schools.”

The lecturer proceeded to tell in simple language, quietly and graphically, of a few incidents which had occurred in his life in Canton. A Chinese mother had been scolded by her husband, who was irritated by the continual crying of their child, a baby suffering from teething. She took it to an old woman in the village, who said that the child had an evil spirit, and could only be cured in one way. The remedy was to hold the child is the flames of a lamp. ‘‘When they brought the child to me,” said Dr. Kirk, ‘‘it was dying of burns, some of them over an inch deep. That baby was dying of superstition!” On another day the doctor was called in to see a young man, who had broken his arm. He found the patient in an indescribable condition. Wasted with sickness, the man was lying on a couch, his outstretched arm supported on a chair. The limb was dried up, blackened, dead, and was slowly separating at the elbow joint. When he asked how long the unfortunate bad remained in this position, he was told ‘* two,, months.” All endeavours to persuade the parents that amputation was necessary failed. They thought the doctor wanted to steal the arm. For another month, the man lay there, then the limb dropped off, and another victim was sacrificed on the altar of superstition !” Dr. Kirk paused, and went ou to speak of a Chinese husband, burning heaps of rags, and beating a brass gong, while a few yards away, behind a screen his wife lay bleeding to death. The work of a medical missionary, the lecturer said, was ten times easier, when there was a mission school alongside. Superstition retarded progress, and education cleared away this great barrier.