We are confident that the following report from Doctor Lilly, prepared at our request, will be read with much interest. He responded to the General Conference call for a physician to relieve Dr. D. D. Coffin for furlough, and went to Nanning during a time of much unrest, and not without considerable personal danger. In September we referred to the appreciation on the Part of the leaders in the China Division for his spirit and his valuable service. Doctor Lilly is now returning to the White Memorial Hospital to complete the last year of his residency in surgery, following which we sincerely hope he will again serve the China field.
H. M. W.
It was sent out to take Doctor Coffin's place at Nanning for a year, and with my wife and two children left the States on June 2, 1939. We arrived in Hong Kong on Tune 22 and remained there a week, getting acquainted with the South China Union officials and buying supplies. From there we went on to Haiphong, French Indo-China, and thence to the Nanning Mission Hospital by car, arriving some eighteen hours later.
We were well pleased with the hospital, the foreign homes, and the surroundings. I can hardly imagine a more beautiful mission compound than ours at Nanning, with its lawns, shrubbery, and flowers. The work of the hospital was progressing under the care of Doctor Zukor, a German-Jewish refugee doctor, who was filling in until my arrival. Doctor Coffin had to leave a month before I arrived.
We endeavored to carry out the program already in operation for the hospital, just as Doctor Coffin had been doing. We also tried to do our best to make the work of the hospital serve as the "entering wedge" for sowing the seed of the gospel message. A native Bible worker talked with the patients as they waited their turns to be examined, and our field missionary secretary and colporteurs sold many of our books and magazines to patients as they visited them in their rooms. The patients were also invited and assisted in coming to various religious services.
Our hospital business grew in volume as the weeks went by. We had a listed capacity of thirty-five patients, but many times we had eighty. We had to alter the custom of allowing a relative to stay with a patient, so that we could accommodate another patient in the room. Many times the examining and treatment room tables were occupied by patients, and some reclined on the floor. As to the types of cases seen, it was indeed a physician and surgeon's paradise. Malaria constituted about fifty per cent of the medical cases, with every other condition to which human flesh is heir making up the other fifty per cent. It was very common to see one patient having five or six different diseases at the same time. -During the six months we were permitted to work after my arrival, we took care of many surgical complaints, both major and minor. Doctor Coffin had developed a fine reputation in obstetrics, and we averaged a baby a day even after he left.
Ten days after our arrival, we had our first air-raid warning. I did not know what it was at first, and had to ask for an explanation. From this time on, till the Japanese forces arrived, we had air-raid warnings and bombings at one to two day intervals. On August 30 we had a terrible bombing. Five-hundred-pound bombs fell within two hundred yards on either side of the hospital, but we received no material damage. This was just one of many occasions which demonstrated for us God's continual protecting care over His work. Some five hundred people were killed at this time.
Ninety-nine were brought to our hospital for care, and such mutilated bodies and extremities as we saw then can hardly be imagined. We soon had a large stack of amputated legs and arms. It was far into the night before we had finished taking care of these unfortunate sufferers. We took half an hour off and walked about through the wreckage. There were many groups of people standing around their dead, with their offerings of food and their incense sticks burning, wailing at the top of their voices. It was indeed a heart-touching scene. As a result of the many air alarms and raids, the nervous equilibrium of my wife and children became so severely strained that it seemed best for them to return to Hong Kong. It was nine months before I saw them again.
The Japanese troops occupied the city the twenty-fourth of November. We shuddered as we watched them searching each house in successive order as they came down the street. On reaching our compound they came no farther, and at no time were we searched or otherwise molested. After their arrival our hospital work ceased, as all Chinese, except those who were found to work for the Japanese, fled from the city to villages some seven to ten miles away. We were permitted to go out and do medical work for these people for perhaps six weeks. Then we were forbidden to do any more work, for the Japanese said they wanted to do medical work for the Chinese and thus win their hearts.
I stayed on for six months after the occupation, even though there was very little opportunity for medical work. As time went on and the day approached for me to leave, it became evident that no one could come in to farther look after our interests there, even though desperate efforts were made by our union workers to get in. We received notice from the conference office requesting the names of those who were to go out with me. Accordingly, we handed in the names of fourteen nurses and other mission workers to the Japanese for a pass through their lines, specifying a certain day we would like to leave. They finally gave us the passes, permitting us to go on the next day after the one we had specified. We were afterward to see how providential this was.
The first day the Japanese took us seven miles in a truck, and after this we had to walk. The first night out we tried to sleep on the floor of an old temple, but the fleas were so troublesome that there was very little sleep. The second night we came to Chinese-occupied territory, and from there on our way was made much easier because of the good influence of the hospital. Almost every official knew of the hospital and its work, and was glad to help us along. They provided us with buffalo carts for the baggage and horses for the weaker ones of our party.
In the village in which we spent the second night, we found several wounded guerrilla soldiers who had just been brought in and had no one to care for their wounds. We were able to give them the care they needed for that time. After we left, there was no one to care for them. They told us that if we had come along a day sooner, we would have run into their line of march and would not have been allowed to proceed farther.
After five days of walking, we came to a river, where we obtained a sampan to take us a four days' journey up the stream. At night we stopped at various villages along the way. As we walked through these villages, our identity became known, and soon an audience would gather, most of which consisted of former patients. These people would urge us to stay among them, and begged for medicines, mainly quinine. Most of our quinine had been given away before we reached them, and consequently we had very little with which to help.
I saw many dying of malarial cachexia, with no medical help of any kind obtainable. In fact, I was told that in all this country, through which it took us thirteen days to pass, there wasn't a quinine tablet or any other kind of medicine. There wasn't even an old-style Chinese doctor, to say nothing of foreign-trained Chinese doctors or a foreign doctor. It was pathetic to see the reaction of the people on being told that we had no medicine, and could not stay among them. In one village we saw twelve men, bomb victims, who were lying about on the floor of a one-room shack with no one to care for them. We dressed their wounds and wrapped them with rice straw, which was all we had to use. But who could care for them after we left? There was no one.
At the end of the ninth day we came onto a much-traveled road, and found trucks and buses. After three more days we were in Haiphong, again waiting for a boat to Hong Kong. It had taken thirteen days to travel the distance that we had covered in one day when we first went to Nanning. I am indeed thankful that I could be in the work out here for the past year. It is my prayer that my services contributed something to the furthering of the gospel, and thus perhaps recompensed in some small way for the valuable experiences I myself gained.
