Ida and Gandhi had a private meeting together afterward, and Gandhi extolled the virtues of helping poor women to become self-sufficient through spinning and weaving homemade cloth such as he was wearing. Ida agreed. Her mother had started such a program nearly thirty years before in Vellore, teaching the lowest caste women to spin and weave.
Unfortunately Gandhi was not able to return to Vellore for the most exciting day in its history—March 5, 1927, the day the Vellore Medical School Hospital was officially opened. The entire town was caught up in the event. Bridges were whitewashed, roads were swept, and garlands and streamers hung around the railway station. Viscount Goschen, the governor of Madras, came to open the new facility. When he arrived, he had no way of being aware of the last-minute rush that had preceded his arrival. All he saw were wards of patients and attentive nurses in a clean, airy hospital.
Two thousand people—one thousand of them women—showed up for the grand opening. This was gratifying to Ida. Only a few years before, many of the women had not been outside of their zenanas except in heavily curtained bandies. Now here they were in public, gathering to celebrate the opening of the new hospital.
Throughout the dedication service, Ida thought about her grandfather, Dr. John Scudder I. Although she had never met him, she had read his journals. As a result she knew that just over one hundred years before he had stood on this same spot where they were sitting now and prayed that God would send a dozen laborers to meet the spiritual and medical needs of Vellore. Ida got goosebumps as she looked out over the crowd. This was the fulfillment of her grandfather’s prayers.
With the new hospital up and running, it was time for Ida to take another furlough. This time Gertrude begged her to spend at least part of her time doing something relaxing. She even offered to pay for it if Ida would just tell her what kind of break she would enjoy. Ida chose to go somewhere she had never been before, north to Kashmir. Gertrude’s plan called for the two of them to hire a houseboat and relax on one of the majestic lakes in Kashmir, but Ida had other plans altogether. She was ready for adventure!
Ida hired Ali Goosani, a famous guide, to lead her and Gertrude up into the Himalayan mountains, where they trekked across glaciers and to the tops of mountain peaks and ridges. While Ida loved the exhilarating climb up into the mountains, Gertrude was not so eager. Often she had to be carried in a danty, a chair slung from a pole and carried between two laborers. At times the trail was narrow and treacherous, and while Ida strode on ahead, Gertrude closed her eyes in fear for her life. She prayed that the laborers would bear her safely across snow bridges and along narrow ridge tracks with steep drops of hundreds of feet on either side.
Three months later Ida had hiked over five hundred miles through the Himalayas, and she was sad when that part of her furlough came to an end. She declared it to be the most relaxing vacation she had ever spent. Gertrude, on the other hand, confided that she was glad to have made it out alive.
The two women traveled on to Europe, where Ida spent a month in Vienna attending various medical conferences and observing the latest techniques being used for operations. From there it was on to Prague, Berlin, Dresden, and Paris before sailing to England and then across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States.
Many things had changed since Ida’s last visit to the United States. The roads now seemed to be crowded with cars, the music was jaunty, the hemlines of women’s dress had gone up, and people seemed carefree and prosperous.
Ida met many of her family members while she was in the United States, but when she added it up, she found that just as many of her family now lived in India as in the United States. After a whirlwind tour organized by Lucy Peabody, Ida was ready to go back home to India herself. She had new techniques to try on her patients and the diamond jubilee of her father and uncles coming to work in India as doctors to preside over in January 1930.
It was a huge affair—part family reunion and part medical conference. Ida’s cousin Lew Scudder came with his son Galen. Her brother Henry and his wife, Margaret, were also there, along with her brother Walter, his wife, Nell, and their son Dr. John Scudder IV and his wife, Dorothy. Her brother John’s daughters Maude and Nelle were there too. All of them were now missionaries to India. Her cousin Dixie, the idol of her youth, was also in attendance. She was an old woman by now, but she had finally been granted her wish and had spent the last several years touring the poorest villages in South India and living in a tent. It was a wonderful time for Ida, filled with laughter and memories.
In the evenings serious medical conversations were held. After all, some of the best doctors in India were together in one place. And time after time the conversation turned to the one disease that seemed to defeat them all—leprosy.
More than a million people in India suffered from the disease. Some of those with leprosy begged in the streets and in the railway stations, while others tried to hide the telltale light patches that developed on the skin and to go about their lives. But as the feet and hands of a leper slowly lost their feeling, the only thing a doctor could do to treat them was to amputate infected and ulcerated fingers and toes. No one seemed to know much about where the disease came from or how it was caught and passed on. Ida longed for the day when doctors would find the key to understanding and curing leprosy.
A year later another Dr. Scudder arrived in Vellore. This time Ida was delighted to welcome her niece and namesake, Ida Belle Scudder. Ida Belle had graduated from medical school and had written to offer her services to the hospital. She arrived in 1931 and set right to work alongside her aunt. To avoid confusion, everyone began calling Ida Auntie Ida and Ida Belle Dr. Ida. This suited Ida fine. At sixty years of age, she was happy to be honorary aunt to hundreds of people.
Ida pressed on with new projects: the building of an X-ray block at the hospital and the equipping of a new ambulance for the Roadsides. But fear was growing in the back of Ida’s mind. Lucy’s recent letters warned of a financial downturn in the United States. It was so bad that people were calling it the Great Depression, and it was affecting everyone. Men were without jobs, and women were making a pot of soup last three days. Lucy wrote that even though she and the other women were working as hard as they could to raise funds, the dollar donations they used to receive had now turned to pennies.
It did not take long for this falloff in donations to be felt at Vellore. Gertrude was a genius at making every rupee stretch as far as possible, but even she had met her match. The food budget was cut, salaries were reduced, and one branch hospital closed altogether.
These changes pained Ida greatly. She tried to be hopeful, but her hopes were dashed completely one day in October 1937 when she casually opened the latest edition of the Madras Mail newspaper. It was a small paragraph but one that would change Ida’s vision forever. It stated that the new Indian Ministry of Public Health was closing all medical schools that were not affiliated with the University of Madras. The medical school in Vellore had been granting a licensed medical practitioner’s diploma, whereas the University of Madras offered a longer medical degree.
Ida gasped when she read the paragraph. She could hardly believe it. Her students were some of the best medical students in the whole Madras area. But what did that matter if the government was discontinuing the issuing of diplomas?
Ida invited the surgeon general, Dr. Rajan, to meet with her at Vellore. He was very courteous and admired Ida’s achievement of 229 graduates. But he could not see any hope for the school’s continuation.
“The buildings are fine,” Dr. Rajan told Ida, “but you lack adequate staff to qualify to affiliate with the University of Madras medical program. You would need twelve additional professors, each with higher credentials than anyone on your staff at present. And the hospitals would need more equipment, three new laboratories, and how many beds did you say you have?”
Ida dreaded answering him for fear of what he would say next. “Two hundred sixty eight,” she mumbled.
“Yes, well, that’s another problem,” Dr. Rajan said apologetically. “You would need at least five hundred beds.”
Ida tried to remain gracious for the rest of Dr. Rajan’s visit, but she hardly heard a word more. She had heard enough! In the midst of a depression, the work at Vellore would have to find a way to double its income or her beloved medical school for women would be lost.
Ida hardly knew where to turn. Everyone was already sacrificing and working as hard as she possibly could to keep things going. And for the first time in her life, Ida fell into deep despair. She could see no way through the problem that confronted her, and neither could anyone else she spoke to.
While Ida was still in the depths of despair, one of the first-year medical students, Annamma, knocked timidly on her door. Ida invited her in.
“I am sorry to disturb you,” Annamma said, “but I had a very strange dream last night, and I wanted to tell you about it.”
Ida poured a cup of tea for her student. “I am not Daniel the interpreter,” she said, “but go ahead and tell me what you dreamed.”
“I dreamed,” Annamma began, “that I was in a beautiful garden filled with all the flowers you could imagine, and in the middle of the garden was a well. Around the well were many water jugs of all sizes. In the dream I needed water, so I picked up a large jar. I decided it was too heavy, and so I put it down again and chose a smaller one to collect my water in. When I had filled the smaller jar, I noticed that many of the flowers in the garden were dying, so I started watering them. Finally I came to one particularly beautiful flower, but when I started to pour water on it, not a drop was left. I sat down and wept, wishing I had chosen the larger jar after all.”
Annamma looked into Ida’s eyes. “It was a strange dream, wasn’t it? I have no idea why I felt I needed to tell you about it.”
“Well, thank you,” Ida replied. “I don’t know what it means, either.”
As the day unfolded, Ida thought about the dream many times—the large, heavy jar being able to water the most flowers, and the poor flower that missed out because Annamma had picked the jar she thought she could carry more easily.
By that evening Ida wanted to be alone in her room. She picked up her journal and wrote:
First ponder then dare. Know your facts. Count the cost. Money is not the important thing. What you are building is not a medical school. It is the Kingdom of God. Don’t err on the side of being too small. If this is the will of God that we should find some way to keep the college open. It has to be done.
Ida underlined the last sentence. When she put down the pen she had a new determination. She would not choose the small jar just because it was easy to carry. God had given her a large garden to water, and she would shoulder the load and do whatever it took to bring the college up to the necessary standard. Somehow, she told herself, there had to be a way, and she would find it.
Chapter 14
A Coeducational College
A month later Ida welcomed a visitor to Vellore—Dr. Fredrick Hume, an English church leader who represented a union of denominations from that country. He was on a three-month tour of India looking for a place to start a medical school for men. Of course he had read about the government’s new set of rules for colleges, and he was just as worried as Ida was about how to meet this new challenge.
After Ida showed the doctor around, she proudly described all that had been achieved at the hospital. They were delivering over one thousand babies a year, performing over four thousand operations, and seeing thirty-six thousand patients at the Roadsides and branch clinics. And when she told him that her medical school students had the highest pass rate of any medical school in the Madras region, Dr. Hume’s eyes lit up.
