Their ideas on obstetrics are equally unscientific, and a medical man going near a woman at her confinement appeared to them more out of place than a female medical student appears to us in a dissecting-room.  A case of twins, however, happening, and the ointment of all the doctors of the town proving utterly insufficient to effect the relief which a few seconds of English art afforded, the prejudice vanished at once.  As it would have been out of the question for me to have entered upon this branch of the profession—­as indeed it would be inexpedient for any medical man to devote himself exclusively, in a thinly-peopled country, to the practice of medicine—­I thereafter reserved myself for the difficult cases only, and had the satisfaction of often conferring great benefits on poor women in their hour of sorrow.  The poor creatures are often placed in a little hut built for the purpose, and are left without any assistance whatever, and the numbers of umbilical herniae which are met with in consequence is very great.  The women suffer less at their confinement than is the case in civilized countries; perhaps from their treating it, not as a disease, but as an operation of nature, requiring no change of diet except a feast of meat and abundance of fresh air.  The husband on these occasions is bound to slaughter for his lady an ox, or goat, or sheep, according to his means.

My knowledge in the above line procured for me great fame in a department in which I could lay no claim to merit.  A woman came a distance of one hundred miles for relief in a complaint which seemed to have baffled the native doctors; a complete cure was the result.  Some twelve months after she returned to her husband, she bore a son.  Her husband having previously reproached her for being barren, she sent me a handsome present, and proclaimed all over the country that I possessed a medicine for the cure of sterility.  The consequence was, that I was teased with applications from husbands and wives from all parts of the country.  Some came upward of two hundred miles to purchase the great boon, and it was in vain for me to explain that I had only cured the disease of the other case.  The more I denied, the higher their offers rose; they would give any money for the “child medicine”; and it was really heart-rending to hear the earnest entreaty, and see the tearful eye, which spoke the intense desire for offspring:  “I am getting old; you see gray hairs here and there on my head, and I have no child; you know how Bechuana husbands cast their old wives away; what can I do?  I have no child to bring water to me when I am sick,” etc.