Papua

Hospital Life In

“Strenuous, but Interesting,”

Says Missionary Nurse

GLIMPSES of the life of medical mis sionaries in Papua were given by Miss H, Donoghue, who recently arrived in Sydney on her way to Adelaide, after spending three years at the Methodist Mission Hospital at Salamo. After re ceiving her training in South Australian hospitals, Miss Donoghue went straight to Papua, and the hospital life there she describes as “strenuous, but marvellously interesting.”

This hospital, said Miss Donoghue, was established about 10 years ago, and was conducted by the Methodist Mission, sub sidised by the Papuan Government. It was valuable not only for its care of the natives and a good many white people, but as a training school for native nurses and medical boys.

The girls did a two-year course of train ing and lectures, and then went out into the villages to do midwifery and general

nursing, and they made excellent nurses.

The native boys’ course usually took about three years, after which they went out patrolling the villages in Salamo and the other islands, treating cases of accidents and tropical diseases. Later they returned to the hospital to take a post-graduate course in general medical training, which enabled them to do all the dispensing and to perform minor operations and adminis ter anaesthetics.

Many diseases foreign to white people

were treated at this hospital, continued Sister Donoghue. Tropical ulcers were quite common. There were usually several lepers undergoing treatment in the com pound, and there was always a very large percentage of cases of accidents due to attacks by wild pigs and crocodiles. Mid wifery cases accounted for a large pro portion of the hospital work and these averaged between 40 and 50 a year. The biggest work of all, however, was that of the waif baby department.

It is still the custom in some parts of Papua when the mother of a newly-born infant dies to bury the baby alive in the mother’s grave. The work of the Salamo Hospital is to rescue these babies and bring them up until they are old enough to eat native food, and then return them to their people. “There is an average of seven waifs in the hospital all the time,” said Sister Donoghue. “The death roll among these children is very heavy, as by the time the hospital rescues them they are often starved almost to death.”