DR HENRY HOLLAND OF QUETTA MISSION HOSPITAL "He Gave Sight to 100,000

Sir Henry Holland of Quetta balochistan

 

The surgeon in charge of a mission hospital on India's

wild North- West Frontier was jarred awake, the night of

May 30, 1935, by a thundering roar. The room rocked and

pitched, to the sound of fearful crashing and the screams of

patients in his nearby hospital Before he could struggle

from his cot amid falling debris, a huge weight knocked him

unconscious.

 

This was the Quetta earthquake, one of the most disastrous

in world history. In a few seconds it reduced the city of

60,000 to rubble, killing outright some 24,000 of its people.

 

The 60-year-old missionary came to consciousness amid

the deathly silence following the quake. Then, suddenly, he

heard a shout through the darkness. It was his son, also a

doctor and his assistant, who too had miraculously escaped

death. The surgeon painfully lifted his head and called out

in his high-pitched voice, "For Pete's sake, Harry, get me out

of here. There's work to be done!"

 

Frantically the son tore at the hill of rubble, and in 15

minutes the two were organizing rescue efforts. The hos-

pital compound with its facilities for 130 patients, two op-

erating theaters, laboratory, large dispensary and X-ray plant

built up from almost nothing through 35 agonizing years of

 

effort was a shambles. Many of the patients and hospital

staff members were dead or dying. The missionary surgeon

limped about, furiously bandaging the wounded, directing

the removal of hundreds of corpses, giving thousands of

injections to stave off an epidemic of cholera.

 

Meeting perils was nothing new to Dr. Henry Tristram

Holland. When I saw him, in 1957, at 82 years of age he was

still meeting them and bringing Christian profit from them.

A man small of stature and puckish of countenance, his un-

spectacular appearance 'belies his spectacular record and

repute as one of the world's foremost eye surgeons. During

his 56 years in the border country between Afghanistan and

what is now Pakistan, he gave back sight to more than

100,000 persons.

 

In recognition of his life-service to the tribes people of the

North- West Frontier, and for his contribution to ophthal-

mology, Holland was knighted in 1936 by King Edward VIII

the only surviving missionary knight since Sir Wilfred

GrenfelTs death.

 

In Sir Henry's youth there was nothing to forecast him

in the role of either knight or missionary. Son of an Anglican

country parson, young Henry decided to "go into medicine

to get out of the church." While studying at Edinburgh

University, however, he fell in with students intending to

become medical missionaries. Moreover, many of the medi-

cal faculty, he found, were devoted Christians, active in the

University Christian Medical Association. Here he was im-

pressed by such speakers as Henry Drummond, propounder

of love as 'The Greatest Thing in the World," and Charles

Studd, a famous cricket player. One day he noted over a

mantel a cryptic motto, "Not for ours only." Asking its mean-

 

Ing, he found it was from I John 2:2 "And he is the propitia-

tion for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins

of the whole world." Responding to the summons to selfless

living, Henry finally applied to the Church Missionary So-

ciety, a foreign missions arm of the Church of England.

 

Holland offered to go to Nigeria, but was told, "We're

sending you to Quetta/' Mystified, he demanded, "Where's

that?" He soon found out. The North- West Frontier, with

Quetta as its southern bastion, was a rough land of Kipling-

esque people and storied history. Its rocky desert wastes, bar-

ren hills and bloodstained passes such as the famed Khyber

had for 3500 years known the tread of invading armies. In

this no man's land he found a racial mosaic of nomadic Bra-

huis, swarthy Baluchis, marauding Pathan tribes devoted to

blood feuds and banditry. The Frontier tribesman was a

strange medley of the swashbuckling brigand cruel, treach-

erous, fanatical and the brave, proud, individualistic lover

of freedom, deeply religious according to his lights. Tall,

bearded, with deep-set fiery eyes and hawk noses, the Pa-

thans disdained all laws laid down by modern governments,

ruling themselves by tribal "Customary Laws" that were old

before America was discovered.

 

Because their land could not produce crops, the tribesmen

"farmed" the passes by raids on passing caravans. Almost

every family had a blood feud going. The tribes were no-

madic, grazing their camels, flocks and herds in the Baluch

and Afghan uplands all summer, then streaming through the

passes toward the plains of India in the winter. To keep

these hordes of free-ranging peoples in check, strong British

garrisons policed the Frontier.

 

The mission at Quetta, started in 1886, was one of a chain

of stations begun not by missionaries but by British officers

and enlisted men with an enlightened idea of Christianity's

responsibility in colonial rule. They raised funds among

themselves, petitioned the Church of England to send out

clergy and doctors, then supported them for years.

 

Among such Christian soldiers was Major General Sir

Herbert Edwardes, who stood one day at Khyber Pass and

warned his men not to think "this immense India has been

given to our little England for no other purpose than our

aggrandizement. Empires come into existence for purposes

of the world's Creator."

 

Young Henry Holland reached Quetta in May 1900, to

find a plague raging in Karachi, with people dying in the

streets. On the long 400-mile journey to Quetta, he traveled

by pony, camel and on foot across the hot sands of the Sind

Desert, trekking with the tall, hawk-nosed tribesmen carry-

ing their homemade rifles with curving stocks inlaid with

brass and their great curved swords bright with semi-pre-

cious stones.

 

The mission station seemed to him an audacity, a tiny but

brave assertion that Christianity cares for both body and

soul. Such caring, he soon learned, could be costly.

 

Aroused by mullahs, the powerful Moslem religious lead-

ers, tribesmen often went on rampages, murdering Afghan

converts to Christianity, Indians and British as apostates in

Islam's eyes. To the fanatics, the killing of an "infidel" was a

pious act. Prior to Holland's coming and during his first years

on the Frontier, scores of missionaries and their converts

provided Moslem warriors with such passports to paradise.

 

Converts to Christianity suffered even more wholesale re-

prisals. On the Frontier it was a proud Moslem boast that

 

"no Afghan turned Christian has ever returned to his own

country and lived/' One convert, son of a Moslem judge in

Quetta, was seized, spirited in chains to Kabul, the Afghani-

stan capital, cruelly beaten then given a chance to recant.

When he refused, one of his arms was hacked off, then the

other. Still refusing to recant, he was beheaded. However, a

witness to the man's martyrdom later wrote Holland: "The

remembrance of the light and peace in Abdul Karin's face

has haunted me through the years. Tell me the secret of it."

This man too was converted and later executed for his

new-found faith.

 

Holland prayed nightly that *1 may scorn the way of

safety, so that Thy will may be done." To his hospital staff

he said: "If we Christians cannot out-live and out-love any

other religion, we don t deserve to win."

 

He left no patient in doubt as to the motivation behind

his treatment. Before each operation he would say a short

prayer, endeavor to make every healing technique a "testi-

mony to the tender mercy of God." Asked why he mixed

Christian evangelization with medical treatment, he snapped:

"I am a missionary doctor. The Christian medical man who

says everything about the body and nothing about the soul

is not doing his full duty."

 

When a prominent Moslem leader hotly demanded why

the mission tried to convert his people, Holland deftly took

the wind out of his angry sails by saying, "We love your

people, and so we want them to have the best-in religion

as in medicine. Since we think Christianity the best of reli-

gions, we cannot be selfish with it any more than we can

withhold from those we love the best medical skills and

medicines we have."

 

When the 25-year-old doctor first came to Quetta his hos-

pital boasted only a few beds and almost no modern equip-

ment. His own experience in surgery, as a student at Edin-

burgh, had been limited to opening a few abscesses and

presiding at a birth or two. But such was the pitiful plight

of the people, particularly during plagues and epidemics,

that he soon was treating almost all ailments in the medical

glossary. He wrote home: "If you ever see P.C. after my

name, it won't mean IVe been made Privy Councilor; it'll

stand for piles and cataracts!"

 

Cataracts particularly. This ailment was common along the

Frontier, and the pathos of the blind touched him deeply.

He soon discovered not only a special facility but his greatest

satisfaction in curing blindness. And as word of his skill got

about, tribespeople came in droves to be cured.

 

One day an old couple, both completely blinded by double

cataracts, stumbled into his compound. They had not seen

each other for years. Holland operated, then placed them in

beds side by side in the hospital ward. Days later, when the

bandages were removed simultaneously, they looked at each

other with first unbelief, then sheer enchantment. As the

two old people went into each other's arms, tears of joy

flowing down their faces, Holland wept with them.

 

Whole families would arrive at the compound, bringing

along children, animals, chickens. A patient quartered in one

of the wards would tether his camel outside, and one or

more relatives would bed down beside him. Some tribesmen,

who had never slept under anything but a tent roof, balked

at the wards. For the sake of tradition and family solidarity,

Dr. Holland always accommodated them. One family, with a

small son needing a bladder stone removal, slept in their

 

bullock cart with the bull in the compound outside. In a

temporary shelter serving as a pile ward, the doctor one day

found a horse tethered next to a patient. Humorously, he

asked if the horse suffered from the same complaint and

let him stay.

 

The Quetta hospital, growing without plan or design, be-

came a helter-skelter assortment of annexes and scattered

family wards. After the earthquake, the present modern,

reinforced-brick 200-bed hospital, with four operating the-

aters, delivery room, X-ray laboratory and nurses' training

school was erected mostly from funds raised personally by

Sir Henry during a tour of England and a public appeal put

on in his behalf by the London Times.

 

A further impressive monument to Sir Henry's skill with

both lancet and religious diplomacy is the famous Shikarpur

Hospital 200 miles southeast of Quetta. One of the largest

eyes clinics in the world, it can care for as many as 600

patients at a time.

 

Shikarpur, an exclusive Hindu city, had been closed tight

to Christian missionaries. But in October 1909, Holland was

approached by Seth Hiranand, a Shikarpur banker and phi-

lanthropist who for some time had been sending patients to

Quetta. "Why do you not come to my city?" he asked. "I

will provide many patients, pay all expenses."

 

Arriving in the forbidden city, Holland found hundreds of

blind and sick swarming about the grounds of Hiranand's

estate. He set up an operating theater on the large scimitar-

shaped verandah and went to work, fighting flies and dust

and clamorous patients. He stayed three weeks, performed

more than 400 operations. Before he left, the banker brought

him a large bag of rupees and a proposition. "Doctor Sahib,"

 

he said, "as you have seen, there are many here who need

your skills. You will come again next year perhaps annu-

ally?"

 

Cannily, the little surgeon replied: "I will, on condition

that you build a suitable hospital, housing for patients, and

underwrite all expenses." The banker agreed readily. Squat-

ting on the floor, Holland drew preliminary plans in the

verandah's dust. That done, he arose. "There's one other con-

dition," he said. "If I come, I must have the right to preach

Christianity here."

 

When the conditions of the project became known, a city-

wide uproar arose. A big mass-meeting denounced the plan

for Christian infiltration. Hiranand sat through the angry

speeches, then rose to win the day by quietly saying, "If

you will find a surgeon as great as the Doctor Sahib, one

who will heal our blind and sick, and yet not preach Chris-

tianity, I will agree with you. Shall the thousands of our

people who need treatment be denied it by our prejudices?"

 

Getting news of the victory, Holland chuckled: 'Til bet

Shikarpur is the first city in the world to be opened to Chris-

tianity at the point of a cataract knife."

 

Next year, he found in that city a beautiful little hospital

ready for him, with two well-equipped operating rooms,

plentiful housing accommodations and 500 new patients

waiting. The reputation of the Shikarpur clinic, in full-tilt

operation each January-February, spread rapidly, until Hol-

land and his associates were performing as many as 1200

cataract operations and 2000 other major surgical procedures

during the six weeks the clinic operated. Leading ophthal-

mologists traveled across the world to observe the Holland

techniques.

 

Among them were many Americans. One, Dr. Derrick Vail

of Northwestern University Medical School, tells of finding

Sir Henry's aura everywhere about the hospital and its

compound. "I was not fully prepared to grasp at once the

striking character of this dynamic and expert eye surgeon.

But in a few moments his simple and compassionate nature,

radiating from his inner warmth, embraced me and I knew

that here was a very great and good man."

 

Another American took Holland back to the States with

him for a vacation in 1928, pressed him to join his staff to

ultimately succeed him as head of one of the Midwest's

largest eye-ear-nose-and-throat hospitals. When Holland

shook his head, the eminent doctor offered a fabulous salary,

saying archly, 'Tm told that every man has his price, Sir

Henry." The missionary surgeon laughed. "I'm afraid you've

been misinformed. You can't put a price tag on a fellow's

love for his people."

 

During his long career, he was offered many other high

medical posts. Always he turned them down.

 

Holland early found that his compulsion to bring sight and

healing to the needy could not be contained by Quetta and

the several out-stations he established. Nor could his adven-

turous spirit. With British political and military officers he

argued that if he could go with them, "throwing pills about

and applying the proper sort of ointments," he might "help

to reduce the temperatures" of troublesome tribesmen.

 

He proved his point one day at a remote village on the

Baluch-Persian frontier where a team of British agents had

to deal with a difficult border bandit named Dost Mahomed.

The bandit, whose murdering and pillaging had thrown the

whole area into chaos, rode up on a prancing stallion and

with five of Bis sub-chiefs inarched into the desert tent for

the meeting, rifles in hand, bandoliers of cartridges criss-

crossing their sunburned chests, surly and defiant.

 

While the negotiations went on, getting nowhere, Holland

slipped out, slung a medicine chest over his shoulders and

crossed the frontier into the walled city where 1500 of Ma-

homed's followers were encamped. For hours he treated the

sick, and when he returned to the place of conference 300

of them came with him, singing praises for the help he'd

brought. The bandit came out, still fuming at the Britishers'

demands. But when he saw the crowd of his own people,

happy over Holland's ministrations, he and his men laid down

their guns. The British agents used the truce to depart hur-

riedly. Afterward, Holland was told, "Dost Mahomed came

to the conference determined to loll the whole party. You

stopped him cold."

 

Alone, or with a mission colleague, he went out among

the tribespeople in areas where seldom a white man had ever

been seen. Through the craggy hills and sunblistered valleys,

he would travel for days on pony back, or on a riding camel

"the most uncomfortable conveyance known to man." When

he came upon a cluster of glowering Pathans, he would dis-

mount to treat diseases, patch up wounds, perform delicate

eye operations.

 

For these proud people, whom powerful British forces

could not conquer, he conceived a lasting affection. And

they for him. He moved through their forbidden areas un-

armedand unharmed. While he performed his operations,

the tribesmen would gather around curiously. He employed

them as screens from the dust and sand, put fans in their

hands to keep the flies away.

 

To win the tribesmen's confidence, lie joined them in rid-

ing, fishing, shooting. In appreciation for his services, they

would come at day's end to his campfire, offering with great

dignity gifts of their poor best: a joint of mutton, fruit, a

hand-made rug, a trinket.

 

On one tour, he had just finished treating a tribe and was

about to go when news came that a band of bloodthirsty

Afghan outlaws had slipped over the border and were in the

vicinity. But, he was assured, "They will not harm you."

Later he learned that his friends had sent outriders ahead to

throw around him an invisible circle of protection.

 

Wherever he went the tribesmen would seek him out.

On one occasion, while on a brief holiday in the Himalayan

foothills, a group of Pathans came leading a woman with

double cataracts, They pointed to her, saying simply, "Doctor

Sahib . . ." The only instruments he had with him were a

pair of iris forceps and a cataract knife. But from the wife of

a companion he borrowed nail scissors, tweezers and a cro-

chet hook; from a hairpin he improvised an instrument to

hold the eye open. Then, sterilizing his strange instruments,

he went to work. Five days later, when the bandages were

removed, the operation proved a complete success.

 

During another trip deep into the desert he came to a

small oasis, found a cluster of Baluchis hovered over a man

groaning in pain and near death. The man had fallen 30 feet

from the top of a date palm tree, badly ruptured his urethra;

his bladder was distended almost to the bursting point.

Having only primitive surgical instruments with him, Hol-

land punctured the bladder, contrived a drainage tube from

the metal case of a clinical thermometer, smoothed it down

with files and emery board, and bandaged him up. Being

60 miles from the nearest railhead, 140 miles from the

nearest hospital, the little doctor hoisted his patient onto a

camel for the long desert trek, breathing a prayer that sepsis

would not set in. Arriving at the railroad station after 24

hours with his patient, he found that the next train was not

due for 36 hours. Keeping his patient alive by sheer will

power, they reached the hospital two long hot days later.

Holland operated again, found the wound aseptic, his man

on the road to recovery. "God is great!" chorused the Ba-

luchis.

 

His reputation spread among the highly placed as well as

the lowly. He treated the Rajah of Shigar at his capital 200

miles from the border of Tibet, on one occasion was flown

to Kabul to save the sight of the King of Afghanistan. One

day he received a message from one of the most powerful

of the Frontier chieftains, the fabulous Wali of Swat, noted

for his antipathy for missionaries. But his need was greater

than his intolerance: he was going blind would the Doctor

Sahib come?

 

Holland traveled by foot through the passes beyond Mala-

kand, where the Wali and his people had attacked the British

and where Sir Winston Churchill served as a war corre-

spondent. Finally he came to a setting like a page out of

The Arabian Nights. After saying the first Christian prayer

ever heard in the palace, Sir Henry operated successfully on

the Waifs eyes. Afterward, they became fast friends, often

went hunting together.

 

Not the least of Sir Henry Holland's achievements for

Pakistan and the North- West Froatier is his role in bringing

Moslem women into the 20th century. When he first came,

women had their place in the rigid seclusion of '

 

Wives were bought like cattle. Hospitals were "men only 9 '

institutions. Sir Henry's mission established a hospital for

women in the Quetta compound, convinced husbands that

it was an economic waste to allow a wife to wither and die.

 

One of his weirdest tasks was the replacing of women's

noses. Extremely jealous, the Pathan's tradition allowed him

to chop off a wife's nose at the slightest suspicion of infidelity.

Later, discovering her innocence, he was likely to regret his

action, bring her to the hospital for repairs. One, when told

that the operation would cost 60 shillings, hesitated until

the doctor asked, "Is it not worth the money to have a wife

with a nose?" The tribesman replied, "That's a hard ques-

tion, Doctor Sahib. You see, for 75 shillings I can buy a new

wife!"

 

Sir Henry also gave Moslem and Hindu womanhood an

important boost up the social and professional ladder by his

program for training nurses and hospital technicians. In

1900, the idea of any proper Moslem girl working outside

the home, let alone in a hospital, was abhorrent. Holland,

always hard pressed to staff his hospital, put constant stress

on the dignity of serving one's fellows in need, on a people's

responsibility to help care for its own.

 

For years the backbone of his nursing staff came from the

outcast and depressed classes, many of them second genera-

tion Christians. His mission's nursing schools were the first

to give women not only training but graduate standing and

certification. Today the daughters of Pakistan's best families

are being trained as doctors and nurses.

 

For more than a half century Sir Henry worked toward the

the day when his hospital could be taken over completely by

indigenous leaders. "It is always a missionary's happiest

 

achievement/* he says, "when a Christian institution can be

handed over to nationals, and is no longer a work done for

them but by them."

 

In 1939 Sir Henry reached his society's retirement age, 65

with no hankering to quit. Shortage of doctors in World

War II gave him the excuse to ask for an "extension for the

duration." He managed to extend the extension to eight

years.

 

In the spring of 1948, when he was 74, having seen his

son Ronald succeed him at Quetta, he took what he thought

was his final departure from the land and people to whom

he had given his life. But he had hardly got back to England

muttering darkly at the "foolishness of a system that retires

a man in his prime" when word came that tribal chiefs had

made up a purse to bring him back for a period each year.

Ever since, he has spent his winters on the Frontier, his sum-

mers going up and down England recruiting missionaries and

stimulating British youth to selfless service.

 

Speaking to an assembly of London young people in

1956, he chided them for modern youth's preoccupation

with security, their hesitancy toward pioneering. "The grave

is secure," he said, "but terribly dull. Serve your age well

and security will take care of itself!"

 

When someone once asked why, with talents that would

have brought him vast material gains, he gave himself so

selflessly to healing the hurt of mankind, he replied, "Re-

member what a chap named Mallory said when he was

asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest? 'Because it's

there!' Thaf s my answer, too."

 

Quetta's mission hospital was originally established in 1886, and had been rebuilt after the earthquake. In the courtyard there were small cottages forming the caravanserai where patients were nursed by relatives who also took care of food and cooking.

 

Throughout the day, electric amplifiers and loudspeakers alerted us to the call of the muezzin, reminding our Christian medical island of the dominant culture that lapped against the walls of the hospital compound. Purdah (seclusion) and veiling were still upheld in Quetta despite its cosmopolitan community. The hospital had a segregated women's section, the zenana wards.

 

The hospital served the city and the region, catering particularly to the trans-border nomadic Pathans who moved down through the Bolan Pass to the southern plains during the winter, returning to the hills of Afghanistan during the summer. Accordingly, these tribal nomads had two opportunities each year to benefit from Western medicine.

 

Cataracts and neglected chronic diseases were common presentations, as was diarrhoea. I myself suffered diarrhoea on several occasions and progressively lost weight during my stay. Faecal tests positive for blood and/or amoebae sentenced one to amoebicides; negatives dictated sulfas, to which my bugs responded.

 

The diarrhoea was surely related to the town's contaminated water supply. Irrigation water from the city's reservoirs flowed through the streets alongside the footpaths. Using removable paddles, the waterman selectively diverted the flow into separate open channels for individual sections of the town on given days. Not surprisingly, the water reaching our vegetable gardens in the hospital compound was murky. This public health issue didn't seem to agitate either the city authorities or, in general, the Western doctors!

 

In winter, the hospital ran an outreach clinic at Shikarpur, 200 miles to the south. Many such clinics, known as "cataract camps", were held on the Indian subcontinent under missionary auspices, foreshadowing the Fred Hollows Foundation.

Cataract surgery and other procedures

 

Every operation began with a Christian prayer. For the anxious patient, this was extra premedication. Local anaesthesia was used for cataract operations — patients' eyelids were kept open during the procedure with a pair of locally made fork retractors, handheld by the assistant, one of the male nurses trained in the hospital's own program. Graefe section with conjunctival flap was standard, progressing to intracapsular extraction. I carried out over 100 cataract procedures in my 10 weeks, and many plastic operations on eyelids and tear ducts. I treated one patient with retinal detachment. I also assisted at numerous general surgical procedures and outpatient clinics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Done