Hospitals.

Grey had, moreover, a hospital policy that no less merits commendation. He schemed to build hospitals all over Cape Colony, and he made a beginning with a hospital at King William's Town. He employed the Kafirs in quarrying stones for it and the military in rearing it. Soldiers were used as day-labourers and sappers as skilled mechanics, and military waggons were requisitioned. When it was finished, he summoned from Wellington Dr. Fitzgerald, whom he had known in New Zealand, to take the place of resident physician. It was a tribute to both Grey and Fitzgerald that the Doctor was induced to come to South Africa mainly by the strong affection he felt for the Governor. The hospital seems to have proved a great practical success. The natives travelled long distances by waggon and on foot to seek medical aid at the new temple of æsculapius. By 1858 11,380, by 1886 111,000, by 1890 130,000 patients had been treated in it. One notable result was the revolution it effected in the minds of the Kafirs. By them, as by all primitive peoples, diseases were believed to be of super-natural origin and could be treated only by preternatural means. Now the superstition was destroyed, as false beliefs are best destroyed, by the inculcation of true beliefs through the use of natural agencies, and the page 100power of the witch-doctor was as effectually broken as the power of the chiefs.

Such, at least, was the claim made by Grey. It appears to have been one of his many delusions about the effects of his measures. Witchcraft survived in South Africa, as it survived for centuries the establishment of hospitals among the most advanced European peoples, and survives indeed, to the present day. The hospital has not been enlarged for half a century, and the matron confessed to Professor Henderson that the natives do not resort to it as much as might be desired.