Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/455

 care of infants, obstetrics, religion, fiction, needlework and embroidery. Of course the teacher is not seen by the gentleman of the house.

In the country it is not beneath the dignity of a lady to tend bees. She may also help in the care of fruit trees, especially the jujube. She may also make straw shoes. It seems singular that a lady should be able to make straw shoes when it would be entirely beneath her dignity to make the better kind, such, for instance, as those her husband wears in town.

If an inmate of a house is taken ill, someone must run for an exorcist to come and drive out the evil spirit which has caused the trouble. It is the blind people who do this work. It is not confined to men alone, but any blind woman, whatever her rank may be, can become an exorcist. Nor do indigent ladies hesitate to enter the ranks of fortune-tellers. It is an easy, lucrative and graceful form of labour, and contains an element of adventure that appeals strongly to some people.

But a higher form of labour to which a lady is eligible is that of physician; in fact, no woman can be a physician here unless she belongs to the upper class. The science of medicine, or I should say a science of medicine, has received much attention from Koreans for many centuries. The Korean pharmacopoeia is celebrated even in China ; and it cannot be denied that it contains many crude drugs that are very effective. Korea has many native lady physicians who administer their powdered tiger's-claw, tincture of bear's gall or decoction of crow's foot, according as the symptoms of the patient may seem to require. The lady physician is called in most often for obstetric cases where a male physician would not be tolerated for a moment. A story is told of a certain queen who was taken ill and no lady physician could be found. The royal patient grew rapidly worse. Male physicians were at hand, but they could not possibly see the patient. Suddenly there appeared an old man at the palace gate who said that he could cure the queen. When asked how he could diagnose the case without seeing the patient, he said,