Much of the time, Burghley was more of a zealous and courageous doctor. He began to use his simple knowledge of Western hygiene to treat people and dispense medicine while he was still in Zhaotong. The British missionary's family home in Zhaotong became the local Western hospital.
After entering the Miao countryside and winning the battle against local sorcerers, Shimenkan's dispensary was initially located in the "five-pound hut" where they lived. The pharmacy became as lively as the church and school. After every service, there was a steady stream of people coming to the dispensary to ask for medicine. His wife wrapped powdered medicines in paper packets and poured liquid medicines into half an egg shell for those who came.
Bergley even planted cowpox for the locals. He brought a special shipment of small blades and vaccines from his hometown. When he couldn't take care of it himself, he held classes to train. Soon the chosen preacher-teachers became inoculators again, armed with enviable shiny knives and eager to go around inoculating the Miao people. "Mr. Bakeli himself cured our Miao people of big abscesses, and he was not even afraid of leprosy." These are the words of a Miao congregation recorded by a Guizhou provincial working group that came down to Shimenkan in 1957 to conduct a survey.
Leprosy patients used to be an outcast group, and in 1914, when Berkeley heard that the governor of Guangxi had booby-trapped and buried leprosy patients alive, he angrily denounced it in the press, and a British leprosy prevention organization soon got in touch with him and sent him some money. With this money, Berkeley bought food and cloth, which were regularly distributed to patients in the neighborhood. After his death, this church's moral responsibility to lepers continued. Four years later, his successor, Zhang Dao Hui, applied for funds from the missionary organization and purchased a piece of nearby wasteland with a water source. The earliest leprosarium in northeast Yunnan and northwest Qianxi soon received dozens of leprosy patients from Zhaotong, Weining and Yiliang. Many patients came with ulcerated bodies, and after receiving treatment, they lived a collective life here. To this day this leprosy village still exists.
In 1927, Shimenkan produced the first Hmong medical doctor, Dr. Wu Zicun. What is even more rare is that after Dr. Wu got his doctor's degree, he decided to give up his city life and return to Shimenkan, where he set up a civilian hospital, carried out traditional Chinese medicine treatments and western surgeries, set up a nursing school to train nurses, and popularized health education in the countryside.