Читать книгу Around the Black Sea. Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania онлайн

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The college for boys has in a peculiar way taken hold upon southern Russia. Three or four years ago Russian students began to come across the Black Sea, and have doubled in number every year since. It was feared at first that they might be unruly and disorderly, or perhaps revolutionary in their tendencies, but, quite contrary to expectations, they have proved to be among the most steady, earnest, able students the college has had. Like Robert College, at Constantinople, Anatolia has Greek, Mohammedan, and Armenian students. Greeks are not found in colleges east of Marsovan, to any extent.

The college has also, as a part of its organization, a large medical department with extensive hospitals and a nurses’ training school under the direction of two efficient American physicians, Dr. Jesse K. Marden and Dr. Alden R. Hoover, assisted by a large native medical staff.

Patients come to the hospital at Marsovan from a wide area of country and it is reaching not only the Armenians but the Mohammedan classes. The medical service has an unmeasured influence upon the people of the country and makes an impression which no other form of missionary work can possibly do. The people know when they are ill and want medicines, but they are not often aware when they are ignorant and need educating or are morally in need of spiritual uplift. When they meet with severe accidents, as so frequently occurs in that country, or when they are racked by disease, they quickly learn that relief can be found at the mission hospital at Marsovan, and some means of reaching there is devised. They often go on a rude cart, sometimes upon the back of some animal, or, if they live upon a possible road, in a Turkish araba or hooded “carry-all.” They find their way to the hospital and there receive the kind treatment which belongs to every hospital, but especially to the missionary hospital in a non-Christian land. After treatment, they return to their homes full of enthusiasm and gratitude for what they have seen and received.