My India 8 - 1950-55

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Let me now talk about the Health Care in our Village during this period.

Well, to make it sharp, there was little health and less care, but what there was was enough of it for me and my six siblings and parents to survive it quite handsomely. That was because we were just then in a state of flux, so to speak, of the World Health Revolution; I come to this later.

If our benevolent Queen Victoria (of the Memorial fame) deemed it fit to peg the Retirement Age for Her Servants at 55, after which She will have to dole out life-long pension, it is safe to assume that She calculated meticulously, using Statistical Tables via Actuaries, that Her Majesty's Blessed Servant is sure to die by 54 [It is a different matter that She was unaware of the impending the arrival of Penicillin on the scene...had She known She would have passed a Law preventing its import into Her Colonies. Let us recall once again that the Brits were here, whatever they may say about the White Man's Burden and all that kind of rubbish, not to feed us the Indians but to feed on us...like the Fisherman who goes to enormous trouble to choose and prepare his bait...not to feed the fish, but to feed on it].

I am rather sorry for my Father's generation (say starting Production around 1940). They were caught in a bind not of their making.

At the height of the British Rule, the man who survived till marrying age, that is around 15, could be assumed to die around 45, by when he would have his second or third wife by his side, who would in all have, as in a Series Production System (on which I wrote a learned paper in IJPR, UK, in collaboration with learned Production Engineers), gone through a couple of dozen pregnancies, abortions, child births, infant mortalities and maternity fatalities.

He was ensuring that one or two sons would survive to cremate and perform the much-needed last rites (Aputrasya Gatir Naasthi).

The population of British India remained stagnant if not declining under Her Majesty's Benign Rule.

I am told that the overall life-expectancy was around 27 (excluding Government Servants, as I said before).

My father and his various brothers would have 'received wisdom' and 'planned' accordingly.

As it turned out for their apple cart, all of their children and most of their wives survived, pauperizing them at one unexpected stroke.

Like, imagine, for instance, the reader of this, if any, planned to have just one kid; and landed up with thriving and kicking quintuplets...he/she would have to revise their entire outlook on Life and its inequities.

Dad, I am truly sorry for you, but our Health Care System in our Village tried its best, but we were just unbeatable, even before it became worse with the advent of various '..llins' and '..cins'.

We survived because the Brits left in a hurry, without dismantling all the infrastructure they built for their own good (they split the country though).

First there was the Rural Dispensary: This had an LIM, LMP or GCIM. Big names but just rural doctors possessing some knowledge of the Local Diseases and the Local Remedies for various 'Indian' diseases ('I' there is for Indian, 'L' for Licentiate, and 'M' of course, for 'Medicine').

Often he didn't have a stethoscope, or if he had one supplied, didn't rely much on it; forget about BP Apparatus; neither he nor us heard about such a weird thing called Blood Pressure.

But he was adept at two things:

(1) Pulse: He would automatically 'take' your pulse with the left hand while scribbling on his 'brown paper' pad (post-World War II, we all had only brown paper, and squat ink pots into which 'ink powder' would be periodically emptied from a pouch with added water; into which a 'pen' like a mini-rocket at the end of which a sturdy 'nib' would be pushed and dipped and withdrawn with blobs of ink spilling all over).

(2) He would take a deep and dirty look at your proffered tongue, and ask you to retract it vehemently.

He would then complete his diagnosis and prescription, both of which would be limited to around half a dozen bits each of highbrow vocabulary, unreadable to all but his Compounder, who would make his own 'guesstimates'.

[I do remember, even when I was just 8, the 'Case' of a rather well-known fairly wealthy handsome and smart but profligate son of the soil, picking out an injection vial from his pocket and requesting his Doctor 'friend' to 'push' it urgently into his arm. But that 'injection' was perhaps bought from the Madras Market (maybe Black); but during my stay of 7 years in our Village, few from my large family had been 'injected', with one exception to which I will return presently...injections were unheard of].

The Compounder would be ringed by just 3 huge bottles of 'Mixture' this or that, of 3 colors, red, while and orange. He would ask for the 'bottles' which we were supposed to bring along and, looking at the prescription quizzically, would pour some of each in various proportions, MIX and let go.

Sometimes when the disease we were suffering from turned out to be malicious and mixtures proved ineffective, the Doctor would scratch and scribble something else and the Compounder would take a bit of newspaper, fill it up with one of three 'powders', fold it intricately and ask us to get the hell out. By then we would have made three trips to the Dispensary in about a week and since we came from sturdy stock (look at me, 67, going strong blogging daily at 4 A M), we would cure ourselves despite all their Mixtures and Powders.

Yes, to talk about my injection ordeal:

One evening myself and my elder cousin were playing hooky at his place at Nellore. His father, my uncle, sent us on an errand to the Trunk Road. Since we were keen to return to our aborted play as early as we could, my cousin took me by a short-cut through gullies dark and deep. On our return, we both were challenged by the well-known Hound (of the Reddy-villes). Neither he nor I knew the approved procedure: just stay put and pretend to pick up a stone or chappal. My cousin juts RAN, leaving me straggling behind. The Doggie had its shame-faced Day: around 1" piece of flesh was missing from my lean and mean thigh by the time we reached home by and by.

My Uncle was suitably kind to me and harsh to my cousin, his Town-Made-Son. But in the end, my Father brought some Carbolic Acid from the Family First-Aid Chest and dressed my wound after stanching the flow of blood and we all forgot about it.

But, my Maternal Uncle, who was just then an MBBS from Madras arrived and had a curious look at it, and asked if I could identify the Doggie so we could keep it under observation for TEN days. I said sorry, thinking that was the end of it. He said, in that case, to be on the safe side, I had to take 14 bloody injections around my navel. I didn't know what I was in for and guessed that they wouldn't be available in Nellore, not even in its thriving Black Market.

But this young chappy was very 'influential and resourceful'. He went to the BIG Government Hospital at Nellore, and without my knowledge and consent procured 14 of the deadly vials along with 14 huge syringes with 1 cm thick needles. He traveled with me and my Father kindly to our Village and met the LMP, showed off his MBBS erudition, demonstrated how to push one as a sample in his presence, and left for his Madras the next day.

The remaining 13 days were Hell for me and my Country Doctor: he was kind and cordial, but just couldn't manage the thick needles and used to take ten minutes for pushing each into my tummy around the sweet spot. As soon as I went home, they would swell like balloons and needed continuous fomentation to prepare and provide the tummy for the next push the next day.

Rabies would perhaps have been less violent as far as suffering went.

.............To be continued tomorrow............











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