Training Missionary

Supermen

By Ex-Islander

\Jf I SSI ON ARIES are to he taught iVI elementary medical work, including such operations as the removal of an appendix, and the fundamentals of useful trades, including carpentry and black-smithing, in order to make them practical missionaries, stated the secre tary of the Australian Board of Missions {Rev. R. A. Shevill) in a rather all-em bracing announcement published in the Queensland daily press recently.

A new Anglican missionary training college for the purpose is to be built, probably in Sydney.. Men will be trained at the college for five years before being sent into the field.

SO, in a mere five years, the new super missionary is to absorb medicine and major surgery, carpentry and black smithing, and, presumably, some theology for the benefit of the poor, long-suffering Pacific native.

One can imagine the future scene in some out-of-the-way island mission station when a kanaka (sorry, Mr. Ward —I mean native gentleman) arrives at the station complaining of a “pain along bel belong me” and the new practical missionary from Sydney college, dropping his forge tongs or carpenter’s chisel, prods the sore belly with a finger calloused and scarred from the smithy or carpenter’s shop, then rushes the victim to the operating table to snip out his appendix.

Presumably he will know how to admin ister the anaethetic, but, in case he does

not, he could always use the sledge ham mer from the smithy, whch should effec tively put the patient to sleep.

One hates to visualise the rest of the operation or the results, but it seems certain that the surgeon’s scalpel, needle and gut-thread will be strange tools in deed to hands, which perhaps an hour previously, forged a plough-share or nailed a roof on a mission building.

Anyhow, what is the BMA going to say about these new missionaries who poach on the preserve of BMA members and dash about thq Pacific snipping out ap pendices in between black-smithing and carpentering?

Even graduates of the Central Medical School in Suva, who have four year’s intensive training in medicine and sur gery behind them, without any side issues like “useful trades and theology,” are not permitted to remove their countrymen’s internal abdominal bits and pieces. And in most medical schools, I believe, the full course covers six years.

IT is often said that contact with the white man last century decimated the native populations of the Pacific.

On the face of it it now looks as if history might repeat itself.

By all means let the missionary of the future learn the rudiments of useful trades, but in the medical line, let his activities be confined to the admnistration of anti-yaws or hookworm injections, bandaging and splinting, bbt let him leave major surgery severely alone.

The employment of one or two fully qualified doctors and something in the nature of a flying-doctor service with amphibian planes would be far more

satisfactory than a lot of half-baked amateur surgeons as envisaged under the New Order for missionaries, Then too, why establsh the training college in Sydney. If the missionaries are to be trained for tropical service, Northern Australia would be a far better place to set up the training establishment.