Let us first pay a visit to “Pentland,” the one remaining “hired house,” in which the Freshmen have their home with Dr. Mary Samuel, the Indian member of the staff, as their house mother.  Just behind it is the thatched shed, carefully walled in, which serves as the dissecting room.  To the uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, for cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables.  The casual visitor sympathizes with the Hindu student who confides to you that during her first days of work in the dissecting room she could only sleep when firmly flanked by a friend on each side of her “to keep off the spirits that walk by night.”  After a few weeks of experience, however, the fascinating search for nerve and muscle, tendon, vein, and artery becomes the dominating state of consciousness, and the scientific spirit excludes all resentment at the disagreeable.

Pentland Compound possesses another feature in pleasing contrast to the dissecting shed.  As you come away from a session there and close the door of the enclosing wall, from the opposite end of the compound comes the sound of children’s voices in play.  There in a comfortable Indian cottage lives the jolly family of the Children’s Home.  They are a merry, well-nourished collection of waifs and strays, of all ancestries, Hindu, Muhammadan, and Christian, mostly gathered in through the wards of the Mission Hospitals.  Only an experienced social worker could estimate what such a home means in the prevention of future disease, beggary, and crime.  It is good for the medical students to live in close neighborliness with this bit of actual service.  One student in writing of her future plans mentions that, as an “avocation” in the chinks of her hospital work, she plans to raise private funds and found a little orphanage all her own!

Early Rising.

Not far from Pentland are the new buildings of Voorhees College belonging to the Arcot Mission of the Dutch Reformed Church.  For the resent, the Medical School has the loan of its lecture rooms and laboratories in the early morning hours before the boys’ classes begin.  That means seven o’clock classes, and previous to that for most of the students a mile walk from the town dormitory.  Here is the Chemistry Laboratory.  Freshmen toil over the puzzling behavior of atoms and electrons, while in lecture rooms the ear of the uninstructed visitor is puzzled by the technical vocabularies of the classes in anatomy and surgery, and one wonders how the Indian student ever achieves this vast amount of information through the difficult medium of a foreign tongue.

[Illustration:  DR. SCUDDER AND THE MEDICAL STUDENTS AT VELLORE.]

In Hospital Wards.

Next in our path of visitation comes Schell Hospital, where the theories learned in dissecting room, laboratory, and lecture are connected up with actual relief of sick women and children.  Here the students are divided into small groups and many kinds of clinical demonstrations are going on at once.  In the compounding room you will see a lesson in pill-making.  That smiling young person working away on the floor in front of the table is a West Coast Brahman, sent on a stipend from the Hindu state of Travancore.  It is her first experience away from home and the zest and adventure of the new life have already fired her spirit.