Adding to the challenge, when the Schell Hospital opened, South India was in the grip of a famine brought on by the failure of the monsoon rains. Ida soon found herself overwhelmed with starving and diseased people. Some of them had walked a hundred miles in the hope of being fed. Just as had been done when Ida was a small child, feeding stations were set up at the mission, and everywhere Ida went, people begged her for food and water. Throughout this time Salomi was always at Ida’s side, helping in any way she could.
Some cases Ida simply did not feel experienced enough to handle without the support of an older doctor. One of these cases presented itself soon after the hospital opened. A young girl was admitted who had a huge tumor in her stomach. Ida froze with fright when she saw it. Up until now she had delivered babies, lanced abscesses, and carried out other simple procedures, but she had never undertaken a major operation on her own. She trembled as she stood on the veranda and told her mother about it.
“I just can’t do it. It’s not that I don’t want to help her, but cutting into someone’s stomach is a major operation, and I am not ready for it,” she confided.
“Do you know anyone around here who is more ready than you?” her mother asked.
“No,” Ida stammered, “but you don’t understand. If I do something wrong, she could die on the operating table.”
“And if you don’t do anything, won’t she die anyway? Suppose she died because there was no woman doctor who had the courage to operate on her. Wouldn’t that be the worst case of all?” Mrs. Scudder asked.
“Yes,” Ida replied, as a look of understanding spread across her face.
She turned and walked away with determination in her step. She was ready to operate, and she needed to do it quickly before she lost her resolve. She called Salomi to bring the patient to the operating room as she made preparations for the operation. Before she picked up the scalpel, she prayed, asking God to guide her hands and keep them steady.
Thankfully, things went well with the operation, and the girl made a complete recovery. Ida was relieved and felt encouraged to continue treating the most difficult cases admitted to the hospital.
Some patients, however, Ida could not treat because their families forbade it. These cases were the most depressing of all for her to deal with. One woman needed an immediate operation or she would die. The woman, who had five small children at home, desperately wanted Ida to operate on her, but her husband refused to allow it. Ida could do nothing as the woman was lifted onto a bandy and taken home to die. Ida knew that she was fighting ignorance and superstition every bit as much as she was fighting poor hygiene and disease.
Finally, late in 1902, rain began to fall and the drought was broken. By the time crops were growing in the fields and the famine subsided, it had been a tough first year for the new hospital and its lone doctor. Ida had treated over twelve thousand patients and performed 56 major and 428 minor operations.
Tragically, the famine was followed by bubonic plague, which swept through Vellore in 1903. Many people were already weak from more than a year with little food, and Ida watched as about twenty patients a day perished from the plague. Although a vaccine was available, many people refused to take it. Rumors spread that European doctors were using the vaccine to murder Indian people and that the British Empire was paying them a good sum of money each time they succeeded.
Such rumors made things difficult for Ida, and before long not a single patient was willing to brave the hospital. Instead Ida took her skills into the town, where she was sometimes invited into a home to treat an ailing person. But normally, by the time she arrived, it was too late to do much except make the patient comfortable and urge the rest of the family to get inoculated.
In the four weeks that the bubonic plague raged in and around Vellore, a total of four hundred people died. And by the time the plague abated throughout southern India, it had taken the lives of over one million people.
Once the plague passed, patients returned to the hospital, and several new helpers joined the staff. One of these was a pharmacist named Mrs. Gnanammal, a thirty-five-year-old Christian widow. She was very efficient, and Ida was soon relying on her to mix the medicines for the hospital and train Salomi. Another Indian woman, Guanasundram, joined the staff, along with Mary Henry, a nearly blind woman whom Ida made hospital matron. Ida’s mother also helped. With these capable women at her side, Ida began to share the burden of running the hospital.
At times Ida felt an uncanny urge to double-check on a patient. One of these occasions occurred in September 1903. Ida was sitting in her dispensary, ready to examine the next patient, when she felt a sense of dread come over her. She felt it had something to do with the baby girl she had delivered two weeks earlier. The baby was sickly, and Ida had spent many hours helping it survive until it was now strong and ready to go home later in the day. She wondered if God was trying to tell her something.
Ida jumped up from her chair. “I will be back in a moment,” she said over her shoulder as she rushed for the door. Even as Ida did so, a voice in her head told her she was being ridiculous. The baby must be fine, or one of the workers would have come to fetch her. Still, she ran on until she came to the ward where the baby was. All seemed well as she stepped inside. Salomi was bent over a child feeding it, and the other babies all looked perfectly fine. Ida glanced over at the screened-off area where the little baby and her mother were. Since the feeling would not go away, she walked over and looked behind the screen.
“No! No!” she yelled as she saw the mother and grandmother standing over the baby, pressing a pillow firmly against its face. Startled, the pair looked up and loosened their grip. Ida reached for the baby, who was already turning blue. Desperately she massaged the child’s chest, willing it to breathe. Finally she heard a small choking sound—the baby would live. Holding the child close to her, Ida turned to the mother and grandmother.
“How could you do this to an innocent child?” she asked. “You have plenty of money for her dowry when the time comes, and she is such a beautiful baby!”
The grandmother spat on the ground and raised her eyes defiantly to Ida. “She is better off dead. She was born on an unlucky day. It is the will of Allah that she die. We are merely carrying out his wishes. If he did not wish her dead, why did he allow her to be born so unlucky?” the old woman snarled.
Ida was so furious she wanted to explode, but she controlled her temper. “I have worked hard to save her, and you want to destroy her. You can’t really mean that she would be better off dead. Look at her—she is such a sweet little thing.”
The grandmother’s eyes squinted, and a sly smile came over her. “You don’t want her to die?” she crooned. “Good. We wash our hands of her and the bad luck that will follow her. Take her. She is yours.”
Ida’s mind reeled. “But I…no, you can’t mean…” she stuttered, trying to grasp the implications of what they were saying.
“You don’t want the baby to be killed?” the grandmother repeated. “Then you take her. The cursed little thing is yours.”
Ida looked at the young mother. Did she really want to give away her own baby?
“Yes, please take the baby from me. Perhaps next time Allah will allow me to give birth on a holy day,” the mother said.
Indignation rose within Ida. “Every day a baby is born is a holy day!” she retorted, and then she looked down at the little girl snuggled in her arms. “Very well, if you want to give her away, I will take her.”
With that Ida turned and walked out of the ward.
Chapter 9
Roadside
As Ida Scudder walked swiftly along the path that led to the bungalow she shared with her mother, the gravity of the situation hit her. She was now the “mother” of a two-week-old baby girl!
Ida found her own mother sorting pills on the back veranda.
“The grandmother was trying to kill this baby,” Ida said simply, “and when I rescued it, they gave it to me.”
“For good?” Sophia asked matter-of-factly.
“For good,” Ida echoed. “What am I going to do with it?”
Ida’s mother looked up and smiled. “The same thing any mother does with a little baby. Give it food and think of a name for it. Just take one step at a time, and things will work out fine.”
Ida relaxed a little, thankful that her mother was at her side. Before the day was over, the baby had been named Mary Taber, after the hospital where she was born. Ida also found some local mothers who were willing to nurse Mary until she was old enough to take solid food.
That night, as Mary lay in a crib beside her bed, Ida said a special prayer of thanks to God for giving her the urge to check on the child just at the moment when the child was in peril. Ida hated to imagine what might have happened if she had not obeyed the urge to rush and check on the baby.
Under the care of Ida, her mother, and Annie, little Mary thrived. She became a smiling, chubby child, and she was soon joined by three other girls who were thrust upon Ida. While it was not Ida’s idea to start a small orphanage, she could not turn away a baby in need. She tried to explain her growing clan in a letter to the mission board.
I cannot refuse to take any child, no matter of how poor their birth or parentage, for we know that if they are surrounded by love and the right environment, they will grow up to be strong men and women: if we refuse to take them they will be sold to temples or houses of ill-fame to be brought up in the midst of the foulest sins. The Master took little ones into His arms and loved and blessed them and we are trying to follow in His footsteps, and are gathering in all we can.
The children that Ida dreaded to see were those who had come to the hospital too late for her to help. One such child was a one-year-old boy. When his mother unwrapped the rags that covered him, Ida was repulsed to see a huge, running abscess on his left leg.
She turned to the mother and said, “What a pity! Why didn’t you bring him to me sooner? He must have been in great pain for days.”
The woman nodded. “That is true,” she admitted, “but I could not bring him earlier. I did not dare. It was forbidden.”
“Why?” Ida demanded.
“Because everyone told me that it was the image of a god growing on my son’s leg and that I would anger the god if I touched it or let anyone remove it.”
Ida did not trust herself to speak. Instead she picked up the little boy and carried him to the operating room, where she opened up the abscess. Just as she expected, it had grown inward as well as outward, and the boy’s bone was infected. The boy would surely die, and Ida could do nothing to save him. With great sadness, she stitched him up and took him back to his mother.
That night Ida could not sleep. Thoughts of the dying little boy filled her mind. Surely there must be something I can do about it, she thought. People in the villages need to know that there are other ways to treat disease. The problem was not that there was no one in the village to act as a doctor. Quite the opposite was true: too many people claimed to have healing powers. Ida had been in India long enough to know that these “healers” fell into three categories.
The first group were the charm makers, who tied small pouches of crushed jackal’s rib or swordfish spine around a sick person’s neck and wrists and promised that they would ward off everything from smallpox to cholera.
The next category was more dangerous. These people were called “couchers,” who specialized in operating on cataracts, a common cause of blindness in India, even among small children. For a fee and without sterilizing any equipment, the coucher would thrust a needle into the person’s eye and push the hardened lens to one side. At first the patient could see better, but his or her better sight was quickly followed with inflammation and then complete, irreversible blindness. By then the coucher had moved on to the next village.
