Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/209

 paid official in the sphere in which he moves. Hence most Assistants, if unmarried, prefer the duties of a regiment, and the society of officers on the same scale of pay as themselves. Civil stations are left to married men, or to a new class of indigenous qualifications—Sub-Assistant-surgeons.

The principal medical duty of a civil station is medical jurisprudence. The natives, with all their gentleness, are a most revengeful and blood-thirsty race amongst themselves. Assault, and maiming, and murder, and poisoning, are very frequent;and in a populous zillah few days in the year pass over without some case of the above nature being brought before the magistrate, and referred to the Civil Surgeon. He is, indeed, the principal reference on such subjects, and will do well to keep his knowledge of that branch of his profession fresh in memory. The most frequent mode of poisoning is by the leaves of stramonium, (which grows everywhere,) given in a currie, and the sudden death is accounted for by cholera.

3. PRISONERS AND JAILS.—When a culprit is convicted by a magistrate, and sentenced to imprisonment, corporal punishment, or death, the sentence, if approved of by the sessions judge, and by the Sudder Nazamut Adawlut, is carried out in the zillah jail; if to imprisonment for life, he is removed to the great jails of Agra or Alipore;