What do she and her attendants treat?  Sore eyes and scabies and all the dirt-carried minor ailments that infect the village; malaria from the mosquitoes that swarm among the rice fields; aching teeth to be pulled; dreaded epidemics of cholera or typhoid, small pox or plague.  Now and then the back seat is cleared of its impedimenta and turned into the fraction of an ambulance to convey a groaning patient to a clean bed in the hospital ward.  Once at least a makeshift operating table has been set up under the shade of a roadside banyan tree, and the Scriptural injunction, “If thy foot offend thee, cut it off,” carried out then and there to the saving of a life.

At dark the plucky little Ford plods gallantly back to the home base, its occupants with faded garlands, whose make-up varies with the seasons—­yellow chrysanthemums with purple everlasting tassels at Christmas time; in the dry, hot days of spring pink and white oleanders from the water channels among the hills; during the rains the heavy fragrance of jasmine.  All the flowers do their brave best for the day when the Doctor passes by.

Where no Doctor Passes by.

But what of the roads on which the Doctor never passes?  From Vellore’s fortress-crowned hills they stretch north and south, east and west, and toward all the intermediate points of the compass.  Every city of India forms such a nucleus for the country around.  Amid the wheat fields of the Punjab, under the tamarinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus pools and bamboo clusters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black cotton fields of the Deccan are the roads and the villages, the villages and the roads.  Some mathematically minded writer once computed that, if Christ in the days of His flesh had started on a tour among the villages of India, visiting one each day, to-day in the advancing years of the twentieth century many would yet be waiting, unenlightened and unvisited.  Few have been visited by any modern follower of the Great Physician.  Who can compute their sum total of human misery, of preventable disease, of undernourishment, of pain that might all too easily he alleviated?

[Illustration:  Kamala (Lotus Flower), Winner of The Gold Medal in Anatomy in Vellore Medical School]

[Illustration:  A Little Lost One—­What Will Such Girls Do for India? 
 CONTRASTS]

A Problem In Multiplication.

Was it, one wonders, the memory of the Gudiyattam road, and those like it in nameless thousands, that burned deep into Dr. Ida Scudder’s heart and brain the desire to found a Medical School, where the American Doctor might multiply herself and reproduce her life of skillful and devoted service in the lives of hundreds of Indian women physicians?  It is the only way that the message of the Good Physician, His healing for soul and body, may penetrate those village fastnesses of dirt, disease, and ignorance.  One hundred and sixty women doctors at present try to minister to India’s one hundred and sixty millions of women, shut out by immemorial custom from men’s hospitals and from physicians who are men.  “What are these among so many?” What can they ever be except as they may multiply themselves in the persons of Indian messengers of healing?