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ART. IV. (1.) Report of the Committee appointed by the Right Honourable the Governor of Bengal, for the establishment of a Fever Hospital, and for inquiring into Local Management and Taxation in Calcutta. Folio, with Appendices from A to F folio. Bishop's College Press, Calcutta, 1839.

(2.) Statistics of the Educational Institutions of the East India Company in India. By Lieut.-Colonel W. H.SYKES, F.R.S. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. 8, 1845.

(3.) Statistics of the Government Charitable Dispensaries of India, chiefly in the Bengal and North-western Provinces. By Lieut.Colonel SYKES. Journal of the Statistical Society, vol. 10, 1847. (4.) Commentary on the Hindu System of Medicine. By T. A. WISE, M.D., &c., Bengal Medical Service. Calcutta, 1845.

It might have been expected that amongst the secondary class of benefits conferred by missionary enterprise upon the heathen, the boon of European medical science would occupy the chief place. But such has not been the case. Of late, indeed, medical missionaries have settled in several places on the coast of China, and their attempt has been crowned with most gratifying success, especially as sufficing to prove how eagerly a prejudiced and unsocial people like the Chinese will avail themselves of the benefits offered. The success which has attended the efforts of these benevolent men supplies a powerful plea for the general extension of the scheme to other countries, more particularly to Hindustan, where not only is this description of Christian enterprise urgently demanded by circumstances, but where, as we hope to show, a new, far less expensive, and, therefore, more effective kind of medical agency, might easily be obtained. As we do not remember to have seen the subject of medical missions adequately discussed, we deem it well to invite the attention of our readers to the arguments in favour of this invaluable adjunct of the mission station, for we are per suaded that the diffusion, in the best way, of the benefits of European medical science in connexion with missions, ought to rank (far behind, indeed, but still) next in importance to the diffusion of the Gospel itself, the success of which it is adapted most powerfully to promote.

Modern missions for the conversion of the heathen differ widely in several respects from the mission of the Apostles and primitive teachers. The latter, if we keep to the New Testa ment period, had only one description of field for their labours

-the most civilized portion of the Roman Empire. Judæa, whence they issued to preach the Gospel, was itself a Roman province, and it was not to foreigners, but to their own fellowsubjects that they addressed themselves. We have no particular account in Scripture of the propagation of Christianity among the barbarians and savages beyond the bounds of the empire. On the contrary, the Apostles, in all the places they visited, were in a sense at home, since they everywhere found their Jewish fellow-countrymen living under the protection of special edicts and decrees, and, being themselves regarded by the governors as a Jewish sect, they received the protection and exercised the privileges of Jews. True, they were often in afflictions and dangers, but these, with one or two exceptions, arose from the turbulence and bigotry of their countrymen. As for the government, we are compelled to admire in general its treatment of the missionaries. The fullest liberty was allowed them to proselytize, not Jews alone, but their heathen fellowsubjects of every condition of life, from the dignified pro-consul down to the meanest bond slave; insomuch that it may be questioned whether, except within the bounds of English rule, the same, or anything like the same liberty would by any government in the world be even now conceded to so zealous a sect as were the first Christians. In this respect-freedom to proselytize-we at once recognise a contrast in the circumstances of a considerable portion of their successors in the work of modern missions.

But not only did the Apostles find, in the provinces, liberty of action, public order and well administered laws-they found a civilization (at least in most of the places mentioned in the Acts) much beyond that which they had left in Judæa-more, incomparably, of science, a higher state of the useful and elegant arts, and far more of literary taste. The cities visited by the Apostle Paul were the most polite and learned of the time, which, excepting the Gospel (how much is enunciated in this one word!) had nothing, in the way of direct improvement, to receive from the Christian missionaries. On the contrary, had these men possessed the requisite leisure or the curiosity, which it would be almost irreverent to attribute to them, they might have seen and learned much that to them was new on a variety of important subjects. To this fact we crave special attention, as indicative of a marked difference between primitive and modern missions. For the primitive missionary there was one field, and one alone, the wealthy, wisely governed, anciently civilized provinces of the Roman empire; for his modern successor not one, but various fields; the heathen world at

large; chiefly, beyond the limits of civilization:-regions, to a great extent, unknown to the Roman and the Greek.

To take an instance suited to our present purpose (by way of illustrating the contrast)-the state of the healing art. The Apostles, and a limited number of the converts, possessed miraculous gifts of healing; the exercise of which they seem not to have confined to the members of the church, but to have bestowed freely, as power was given them, upon all who applied. Where, however, this miraculous power of healing was not possessed, the Missionaries would, in the Grecian provinces, and in Italy, discover their own inferiority to the inhabitants in a knowledge of the science of healing. We know little about the state of medicine in Judæa at the period referred to-if any knowledge of the kind existed there worthy the name of science. What we gather from the narrative of the Evangelists, and in the Acts, warrants the inference that in this particular the Jews were not more advanced than the people of Eastern Asia are at the present day. Everywhere (just as to the European physician in China and Hindustan) crowds of the sick and im potent flocked to the Saviour; accumulated masses of helpless invalids, the same as are to be found, of necessity, in every populous country, where no science exists equal to their relief or

cure.

In proof of the difference here remarked between the rude knowledge of medicine among the Jews, and the advanced state of the science in the central provinces of the Empire, we may refer to the writings of a Roman medical author, a contemporary of the Apostles - Cornelius Celsus,* whose treatise On Medicine' affords a luminous account of the medical science of his own age-drawn chiefly from the Greek writers--but enriched, there can be no question, from the results of his own experience as a physician. One who has not examined the immortal work of Celsus can with difficulty imagine the progress of the science, as presented by him in perhaps too advantageous a light, when compared with the skill and knowledge of his contemporaries. The absence in the Treatise of every trace of superstition is complete, and the same may be said of all pretension to mystery; and it would not be easy to cull out a single sample of ridiculous remedies, or practices such as we meet with in the works of our own older medical authors. Throughout are the evidences of practical sense-of a vigorous, disciplined understanding-alive to the uncertainty of medicine,

According to Dr. Milligan, Celsus died A.D. 60, aged sixty years. The Treatise on Medicine he supposes to have been given to the public, A.D. 35, De Celsi vita, prefixed to his edition of the text of Celsus, page 25.

and the difficulties with which the study of it is so beset-as well as of an acquaintance, in a most surprising degree, for his time, with the true path to further improvement. To these acquired and natural endowments may be added exemplary modesty, and a humanity of disposition which few Christians have surpassed. To mention an instance-he refers, with strong disapprobation, to the practice of certain physicians, who, with a view to obtain ocular knowledge of the vital organs, procured criminals-by royal permission-in order that, by dissecting them alive, they might, while the sufferers were yet breathing, contemplate the inward parts-justifying this by the plea, that the tortures of a few guilty persons are as nothing in the search after remedies for the whole innocent race of mankind in all ages. Let us remember that, only a century ago, by like royal permission, and in this Christian England of ours, a criminal, named Ray, was appropriated to the use of the celebrated Cheselden for certain experimental operations on the internal ear. From a subsequent notice, it would seem that this barbarity was not perpetrated; but that the purpose was entertained and published without eliciting a single symptom of public indignation may well excite our astonishment.

But it was in the department of surgery, perhaps, that the Greek mind displayed the greatest activity. This, observes Celsus, does not discard remedies, and a proper regimen; but yet the principal part is accomplished by the hand, and the effect of this kind of assistance is the most manifest of all the parts of medicine.

The following passage, as it preserves the names, and commemorates the labours of certain worthies, the friends of our common humanity, in that remote and (in a religious sense) benighted age of the world, we are tempted to extract entire:

'Now this branch, (surgery,) though it be the most ancient, yet has been more cultivated by Hippocrates, the father of all medicine, than by his predecessors. Afterwards, being separated from the other parts, it began to have its peculiar professors, and received considerable improvements in Egypt, as well as elsewhere, principally from Philoxenus, who has treated of this part fully, and with great accuracy, in several volumes. Gorgias, also, and Sostratus, the two Herons, and the two Apollonii, and Ammonius Alexandrinus, and many other

And at

celebrated men, have each of them made some discoveries. Rome, too, professors of no small note, and particularly of late, Tryphon, the father, and Euelpistus, the son of Phleges, and Meges, the most learned of them all, as appears from his writings, by altering

* Gentleman's Magazine, 1731, vol. i. page 10.

some things for the better, have made considerable additions to this art.'-Celsus, Book vii. Preface.

It would be out of place here to enumerate the ancient operations of surgery, or to enter upon a critical comparison of them with those of our own day. However, it may be safely affirmed that the extent of relief, even then within the reach of the afflicted, from surgery, surpassed what could have been obtained in England before the era of Chiselden and Pott, about the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Such, then, were the minds that had been zealously given to the cultivation of the healing art in those provinces of the Roman Empire which were traversed by the Apostles and Evangelists. And it remains to contrast with the circumstances of the inspired teachers those of the many devoted men of our own age, who have gone with the same object into the Pagan regions of the modern world.

In nearly every respect the circumstances of the modern and of the primitive missionaries are seen to be different. The former, it is true, have the same Gospel to announce, and they announce it to persons equally needing it, but here the parallel ends; for in a knowledge of the sciences which minister to human improvement in general, enlargement of mind, in the arts of life, and in social comfort and enjoyment, modern missionaries are, or ought to be, immeasurably superior to all the communities of men of the present day, to which they are sent. Unlike the Apostles and Evangelists, they necessarily carry with them, besides the Gospel, scientific and social benefits, to confer on even the most cultivated of the unconverted nations to say nothing of the unlettered barbarians and savages. And again, instead of a single field of labour, as in the New Testament times, there is, as we have already said, a diversity of fields-from that supplied by the Esquimaux and the Hottentots, destitute of the simplest elements of civilization, up through various gradations of the social condition to the polished Hindoo, Chinese, and Persian, each requiring in a Missionary, along with the ordinary aptitude to preach the Gospel, special qualifications for the particular sphere; but every one of these fields demanding of Missionaries-if the beneficent example of our Lord in his ministry is to be copied -the benefits of European medical science, of which they, all alike, are nearly destitute; especially of those branches that come under the head of surgery.

The destitution of medical knowledge and skill in countries