THE HEROIC TREATMENT.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2543, 27 October 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE HEROIC TREATMENT.

How the Japanese Cure Disease by Burning. WniLE we lunched in the open quadrangle before the temple (says a Japanese correspondent) groups of cheery Japanese came in, chattering as gaily as any picnickers could wish to, took off their straw sandals, washed their feet, and disappeared in jolly parties to the interior of the temple. When we dropped our shoes, and followed to the one upper room, wc found our jolly chatterers all there, sitting in rows with their faces to the w.H. All were stripped to the waist, and the old priest made marks on their backs in eacred characters to indicate where the moxa should be burned. Following him came a small boy with a lump of what appeared to be very sticky dough in one hand. With dexterous fingers this youngster pinched off a bit of dough, rolled it into a small cone and stuck it over the priest's mark. After him came a staid, stoical, youngster, who, in the most cold-blooded way, touched a match to tho tip of the moxa cone, and went down the lines giving lights. It bnrned without flame, a slow, red glowlike charcoal, consuming tho cone down to the flesli, where it sizzled and smoked for a few seconds, that must have Seemed years to the victims. Searing with a red hot iron would be a quick and humane treatment compared with this slow, eating firo of the moxa. The men and women that I watched for the few minutes that t could endure it, stood it heroically, but by ths! tension of every muscle iu their backs and arms, one could judge of their agony. Ono old man folded his arms, bent his hoad over, and indulged in suppressed chuckles, varied with groans and hysterical ha !ha ! ha's ! A woman buried her face in a blue cotton towel, and made no sign or movement, while two moxa cones were burning down and into her flesh. A young man started to rock to and fro when the fire began entering into his bones, but soon stopped bracing himself, aud sat motionless. Tho priest having set his seal on his victims, sac down by a brazier, put on his big spectacles, and was soon lost in reading a pious book, wholly inrlifferent to the backs frizzling beside him. Thin Mine priest has some secret of composition for his moxa dough that has kept it in favour for many years, and about the only revenue of the temple is from his patient's fees. For rheumatism, lumbago, and such aches and ills it is most beneficial, and gives quick relief to anyone able to endure it. The Japanese resort to moxa for almost everything that ails them, and oue sees coolies with their backs and the calves of their legs covered with inoxa scars. Foreign doctors have discovei'ed the virtues of the treatment for ccrtain things, and in Paris many cases of paralysis have been successfully treated, Charles Sumner having been one of the famous cases of whose paralysed nerves revived by the moxa. A variation of the treatment, used in Paris under the name of moxa, consists in burning with white-hot irons, which is much less painful than with paste cones, and Clara Morris was one of the best advertised subjects undergoing the white moxa. When the patients descended from the moxa room, put on their sandals, and muttered a sullen prayer toward tho open door of the temple, they were hardly to be identified with the gay people who had arrived earlier; and when they walked, it was plain by tho way they held their shoulders that the raw places still smarted.