Christians I have known in Africa. They alone of the Mpongwe have good-sized families of healthy children. They are the living remnant of a dying tribe.

Two outstanding facts make the experience of motherhood in non-Christian lands a time of almost intolerable anguish, both physical and mental. The first of these facts is the absence of skilful, intelligent care previous to and during childbirth, and the second is the presence of innumerable superstitions that envelop the mother and her little one and the whole household.

It is a most interesting study to learn how customs differ in various lands and swing to extremes, from Persia, where the time of childbirth is the occasion for a large neighborhood gathering of women and children, to certain regions of China, where we are told that there is an absolute interdict on seeing mother or child for forty days after the birth, and during that time many and many a little one mysteriously disappears, never to be heard of again. In China the mother who loses her life before being able to give birth to her child is consigned by popular opinion to the very lowest hell, which is said to be reserved for the worst criminals. In a large Buddhist temple on a hill outside of Ningpo hangs a huge bronze bell, over which are tied numberless bunches of hair of women who have died in childbirth. When the bell is rung, the motion is supposed to pull the poor women out of the place of punishment. Among the Lao a woman dying in childbirth is not allowed to be cremated, for her death is supposed to have been caused by evil spirits and the victim is blamed and is not deemed worthy of cremation wherein is merit. These suffering mothers feel as if an angel from heaven had come to their aid, when the loving face of a missionary physician stoops over them, and her skilful hands minister to their needs. A few words by Dr. E. M. Stuart of the Church Missionary Society, at work in Ispahan, Persia, give a vivid picture of the need for women physicians and nurses to do this work,—a need that exists not only in Mohammedan harems, but in the zenanas of India and in the homes of other lands where women live in seclusion.

How Bedouin Mothers Carry Their Babies

In every Moslem land there are countless lives lost every year from lack of skilled assistance when it is sorely needed.... This work calls specially for women-doctors and nurses, for though Moslem women will consent to see men-doctors for many of their ailments, and will even crowd out the men-patients at dispensaries taken by male doctors, very few will allow a man to give them the assistance they need in difficult labour; were even the women themselves willing, it is very uncommon for the husbands and other male relations to consent to it. As a rule they would rather the women died than allow a man to interfere; the only comfort they give them is the assurance of the Prophet that women who die in childbirth go straight to Paradise.

There is scarcely a land outside the pale of Christian civilization where the newborn infant is not surrounded by absurd, painful, or distressing ceremonies because of superstitions that may not be ignored, the “Evil Eye” that must be averted, or ceremonies that are to be observed because handed down from generation to generation. One of the most astonishing and picturesque of these observances is described by the Swiss missionary, Henri A. Junod, in his careful study of “The Life of a South African Tribe.”

The second act is the rite of the broken pot.... This is a medical treatment and a religious ceremony combined. It is performed by the family doctor on the threshold of the hut in the following way: He puts into this piece of broken pottery pieces of skin of all the beasts of the bush: antelopes, wild cats, elephants, hippopotami, rats, civet cats, hyenas, elands, snakes of dangerous kinds; and roasts them till they burn. The smoke then rises, and he exposes the child to it for a long time, the body, face, nose, mouth. The baby begins to cry; he sneezes, he coughs; it is just what is wanted; then the doctor takes what remains of the pieces of skin, grinds them, makes a powder, mixes it with tihuhlu grease of the year before last, and consequently hard enough to make an ointment. With this ointment he rubs the whole body of the child, especially the joints, which he extends gently in order to assist the baby’s growth.

All this fumigation and manipulation is intended to act as a preventive. Having been so exposed to all the external dangers, dangers which are represented by the beasts of the bush, the child may go out of the hut. He is now able “to cross the foot-prints of wild beasts” without harm.... This rite of the broken pot is also the great preventive remedy against the much dreaded ailment of babies, convulsions.

From land to land you may travel, through Africa, Asia, and the Islands of the Pacific, and all the poor little babies and their older brothers and sisters will be found to be victims of superstitions that surround and hamper and often injure their pitiful little lives. The Evil Eye,—oh! how it is feared and how every possible and impossible means is used to avert it. You must not think of openly admiring a Mohammedan baby, or of wearing anything black on your head when making your first call upon it, for you would certainly cast the Evil Eye on it. A Maronite woman in the Lebanon mountains, Syria, had lost a baby three or four weeks old,—her first baby boy. She told a missionary that the child had died because while he was sick they opened an egg, and found therein an eye (the life-germ) and that was the Evil Eye which had killed the child.

“Children in Nyago, Africa,” we read in a Church Missionary Society report, “receive the tribal mark by being branded on their foreheads with a hot iron. Some of the front teeth are extracted as soon as the child can speak.” The teething period as well as every other part of a child’s life has to be safe-guarded from malicious influences. For instance, a child of the Thonga Tribe in South Africa has a white bead tied to a hair about the forehead as soon as it has cut the two upper and lower incisors, for, unless this is done, there is no hope that the child will become intelligent; he would shiver instead of smiling, and the other teeth would not come out normally.

Thank God that there are sometimes missionaries near at hand who have won the love and confidence of the mothers and who are allowed to “drive out the evil spirits” by means of applied Christianity, common sense, and cleverness. Here is an example of all three means used for a baby on the borders of Pigmy Land.

One morning a woman brought down to the dispensary a wee morsel of three weeks; it was a pitiful little object of mere skin and bone. The mother explained that it had been poisoned out of spite, or it was possessed of an evil spirit. “See,” said she, “I have done all I could to let out the poison or devil.” Looking at its body I saw it was covered with a number of small, deep cuts, and the blood had been left to dry. Low moans and a tired cry came from the poor, little, helpless mite as the flies tortured its mutilated body.