"I knew a Doctor..." by Muriel Lester
I. IN CHINA
The short and sturdy Chinese doctor was justly proud of her hospital in Tientsin.
In 1938 Japanese Forces occupying the city closed the special ward where she had taken in scores of drug addicts and cured them of their perilous craving, especially perilous since the Chinese Government had recently enacted a law making the use of poisonous drugs, except for medical purposes punishable by death. The Japanese militarists, on the other hand, were finding the illegal drug traffic useful. It brought them vast profits and also robbed the Chinese of strength to resist either physically or spiritually.
A second hospital
Throughout the occupation this doctor continued her work and even extended it. During the war she set up and operated a second hospital. To be sure her workw as often interfered with, sometimes tied up in red tape, sometimes interrupted by a spell in prison, but everything that came to her she accepted as a new opportunity for learning more about God, even the haunting memory of the horrible sounds she heard from tortured prisoners in adjoining cells.
On one occasion Toyohiko Kagawa came from Japan to Tientsin, but Chinese Christians felt it would be wrong to receive him in their homes and churches, seeing that he was brought in under the protection of an alien army. They knew it was not his wish to be thus compromised, but the fact remained.
The little doctor was the only one who made him welcome in a private house. She gave him the place of honour by the sitting room stove. These two stalwarts revelled in a long talk about the eternal verities, so blessedly unalterable by the time or circumstance. Some of her neighbours were shocked, others envious of her courage.
Liberation
Then liberation came. After a few months the doctor, enquiring about the Japanese prisoners of war in the city, heard that the gaol hospital had a good many inmates. What sort of food were they getting, she asked. When she found that the low calory diet supplied to the ordinary prisoner was also given to the sick, she stirred up the spirit of her friends. Many agreed that of course good food ought to be given to invalids.
Gifts poured in, both in money and in kind. They were packed into a van, along with the doctor. She told the driver to deliver her at the door of the Prison Office and then drive round at once to the back door and wait. He had to, for several hours.
The officer in charge of the gaol was obdurate. Why should Japanese prisoners eat good food? Better than his men were eating?
Her answer and his question were repeated again and again as, to his great chagin, he found her still sitting in his office when by all the rules of ceremony she should have retired after their first interview. But he grew tired before she did. And round she went to the back of the prison and helped the driver to unpack the goods.
As they drove back she impressed on him the necessity of remembering that the next van-load they brought must [be] taken direct to the back door, as there was no longer any need to ask for official permission.
- December 5, 1948; PEACE NEWS