orwellburmesedays by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub

sleeves and sweating profusely. He sprang to his feet with an exclamation of pleasure, and in his usual fussy haste thrust Flory into the vacant chair and produced a tin of cigarettes from the drawer of the table. ‘What a delightful visit, Mr Flory! Please to make yourself comfortable — that iss, if one can possibly be comfortable in such a place ass this, ha, ha! Afterwards, at my house, we will talk with beer and amenities. Kindly excuse me while I attend to the populace.’ Flory sat down, and the hot sweat immediately burst out and drenched his shirt. The heat of the room was stifling. The peasants steamed garlic from all their pores. As each man came to the table the doctor would bounce from his chair, prod the patient in the back, lay a black ear to his chest, fire off several questions in villainous Burmese, then bounce back to the table and scribble a prescription. The patients took the prescriptions across the yard to the Compounder, who gave them bottles filled with water and various vegetable dyes. The Compounder supported himself largely by the sale of drugs, for the Government paid him only twenty-five rupees a month. However, the doctor knew nothing of this. On most mornings the doctor had not time to attend to the out-patients himself, and left them to one of the Assistant Surgeons. The Assistant Surgeon’s methods of diagnosis were brief. He would simply ask each patient, ‘Where is your pain? Head, back or belly?’ and at the reply hand out a prescription from one of three piles that he had prepared beforehand. The patients much preferred this method to the doctor’s. The doctor had a way of asking them whether they had suffered from venereal diseases — an ungentlemanly, pointless question — and sometimes he horrified them still more by suggesting operations. ‘Belly-cutting’ was their phrase for it. The majority of them would have died a dozen times over rather than submit to ‘belly-cutting’. As the last patient disappeared the doctor sank into his chair, fanning his face with the prescription-pad. ‘Ach, this heat! Some mornings I think that never will I get the smell of garlic out of my nose! It iss amazing to me how their very blood becomes impregnated with it. Are you not suffocated, Mr Flory? You English have the sense of smell almost too highly developed. What torments you must all suffer in our filthy East! ’

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