Part 15

III

WINNING FRIENDS IN AMERICA

In 1907, after eleven years of almost unceasing labour, during four of which she had carried the growing work at Kiukiang entirely alone, except for the help of the nurses whom she herself had trained, Dr. Stone reluctantly laid down her beloved work for a few months. During the winter of 1906 she had a severe attack of illness which she herself diagnosed as appendicitis, and for which she directed treatment which brought her relief. But renewed attacks finally convinced her and her friends that she must submit to an operation if her life was to be saved. It was decided that she should go to an American hospital, for as a fellow physician located at another station of the mission wrote, "We all have a very high regard for her and her work, and wanted her to get the best that could be had." Moreover, it was a good opportunity to get her "away from China for a much-needed change and rest."

Accordingly Dr. Stone, accompanied by her friend, Miss Hughes of the Kiukiang mission, sailed from Shanghai, February 9. President Roosevelt, who was acquainted with her work and knew of her serious condition, had a telegram sent to the Commissioner of Immigration at San Francisco, giving instructions that the Chinese physician be admitted with no delay or nerve strain. She was therefore passed at once, with all consideration and all possible help.

From San Francisco Dr. Stone went straight to the Wesleyan Hospital in Chicago, that she might be under Dr. Danforth's care. The operation was entirely successful, and early in April, less than a month after reaching America, she was sufficiently recovered to take the trip to Miss Hughes' home in New Jersey, where she was to rest for a few weeks.

Complete rest, however, was an impossibility to Dr. Stone, even during her convalescence, so long as there was any service she could render. Two weeks after her arrival Miss Hughes wrote Dr. Danforth that "our little doctor" was accompanying her to several of the meetings which she was addressing, and was "making friends right and left for her work." Boxes of instruments, pillows, and spreads for the hospital beds, a baby organ for the hospital, the support of a nurse, and other useful things were being promised by these new friends. "Her smiling face, with no word from her even, is a wonderful revelation to people who judge the Chinese by the putty-faced laundrymen, the only specimen of China they have ever seen," said Miss Hughes. Dr. Stone spent the month of May in New York, attending lectures and clinics in the hospitals there. As she was starting for Chicago at the end of May, she wrote Dr. Danforth:

"Do you think I shall be able to see much clinic in two weeks? That is the only time allotted me, and my only hope is that you will be the 'master of the situation,' and help me to spend every minute to the best advantage.... I have attended as much clinic as I possibly could this month, but it is awfully hard to get around in New York. Do you suppose I would be able to go directly to Wesley Hospital Monday, and do you think Dr. J---- would have the time and the interest to show me the inside methods of the hospital? He wrote me a most kind letter and invited me to do so.... Two weeks will mean a lot if I can be right in the inside track of things. I want some time on the eye and ear work, besides a few clinics on dermatology. I know two weeks will not be enough for the much I want to see and know, but since it is the only time I am to have, I know you will help me to make the most of it."

Thus did the indefatigable little doctor take the "much-needed rest" of which her friends in China had written. That she did make the most of her two weeks is testified to by Mrs. Danforth, who visited many of the hospitals with her, and who says: "In visiting the hospitals she never missed a thing. She saw everything--nothing escaped her notice, not even the laundries. She was always keenly alert for every idea that would improve her hospital."

On her way back to the East, Dr. Stone stopped at Ann Arbor, for she was eager to revisit her "dear old campus," and the faculty under whom she had taken her medical work. "We had a lovely time in Ann Arbor," she said in writing to a friend. "Dr. Breakey, in whose home we stayed, arranged a meeting, or reception, where I saw most of my old professors. Then in the parsonage we met all the ladies of our church. Next day I had a meeting in the church."

The next few months were filled with almost incessant labour, chiefly speaking and making friends for her work. The cordial responses which she met everywhere never became an old story to Dr. Stone and her letters are full of enthusiastic accounts of them. "Here at Silver Bay, a society wants to support a missionary and we hope to find the missionary to-night. The first was yesterday's work and the second we hope to gain to-day." Again, "Last night on the car we met a gentleman whom I know through my sister Anna, and after a few minutes' talk he wants to give me his camera, 5x7, for hospital work. Isn't that splendid?" Or, "This morning we went into a flower-seed store and what do you suppose the proprietor did but to give us the seeds, a big list of all kinds we wanted, and then offered to add a few more varieties. We are having lots of fun here."

Dr. Stone met with no less enthusiasm in public meetings than in her contact with individuals. One of her hostesses tells of her remarkable success in arousing genuine interest in her work: "She spoke at churches very often while she was with us, and not once did she fail to get what she asked for. She did not ask for things in general but for definite things,--pillows for the beds, lamps for the gateway, etc. She is irresistible."

The same friend tells of the glee with which Dr. Stone, whose English is perfect, delighted to learn modern slang phrases. After practising them in the bosom of the family she would sometimes innocently introduce them into her addresses, invariably bringing down the house thereby. At one meeting, after telling a most remarkable story, she remarked, "You may think this is a whopper, but it is true!"

Reports of the meetings at which she spoke contain such items as this: "The pastor of St. James Church offered to duplicate all money given in the collection when Miss Hughes and Dr. Stone spoke. Six hundred and eighty-two dollars was the result. A gentleman present offered one hundred dollars for a speech from Dr. Stone in his church. The speech was made and one hundred and eighty-two dollars put in the treasury." Other items read: "At the district meeting a new auxiliary came into being in ---- Church. No one could resist Dr. Mary Stone's persuasive tones as she went up and down the aisles asking, 'Won't you join?' She told the people how much she needed a pump in Kiukiang and forthwith the pump materialized." The New York Herald gave a long and enthusiastic report of her work, ending with the words: "'Am I not fortunate? And I am so grateful to be able to help a little!' is the modest way she sums up a work of magnitude sufficient to keep a corps of medical men busily employed."

Everywhere this little Chinese woman made friends. The words of one of her hostesses are emphatic: "She was in our home for a month, and she is one of the most attractive women of any race I have ever met. She is so charming that she wins her way everywhere." "She is so gracious and cordial," said another. "She came into our family just as a member of it. I was not very well at the time and she gave me massage every night. Her whole life and her whole interest is in doing for others. And the wonderful thing about her is her ability to do so much." "No missionary that we have is more greatly loved," is the verdict of another.

Dr. Stone greatly enjoyed her stay in America. "Dr. Danforth called my appendix 'that blamed thing,'" she said. "I call it that blessed thing, because it brought me to this country and people have been so kind to me." But she was eager to return to Kiukiang, and early in September was on her way back to China, rejoicing in renewed health and new friends for her work, and in the many gifts which were going to make that work more efficient.

A VERSATILE WOMAN

Chief among the gifts which Dr. Stone received for her work while in America, was the entire sum of money needed to build another wing to the hospital. The need of this wing had been felt for years, for the hospital had become crowded as soon as it was opened. Dr. Stone's ingenuity had been taxed to the utmost to enlarge the capacity of the original buildings, by putting patients into rooms designed for far different purposes, and even partitioning off sections of the halls for them. Still many whom she longed to take in had to be turned away. Many times it had seemed as if the much-needed addition were almost a reality. But the money would not be quite sufficient; or the contractors could not be secured; or prices of building material would rise and the cost would prove to be double that originally estimated; it seemed as if the wing were too elusive ever to materialize. On her return to Kiukiang work on the new wing was commenced, and it was finished the following autumn. This addition practically doubled the hospital work, and Miss Hughes wrote that Dr. Stone was in "the seventh or seventeenth heaven over it all."

At the same time that the new wing was being built, a little bungalow was erected in the hills behind the city, where children with fevers could be sent to escape the intense heat of the summer months in Kiukiang. "The Rawling Bungalow is finished and the children are all up there for the summer," Dr. Stone wrote in 1908. "I know you will be delighted at this annex to the hospital. Of course it is only a bungalow ... but it is a blessed relief to have this place to which to send the sick little ones and those who otherwise would be left to suffer here all summer."

As soon as the masons had finished their work on the new wing of the hospital they began on another new building just beside it; a home for the doctor and Miss Hughes, also a gift from friends in America. That, too, was completed by the end of 1908, and during Chinese New Year, a time when the hospital work was less pressing, Dr. Stone and Miss Hughes took a trip to Shanghai to buy furniture for it. It is easy for one who saw the doctor then to imagine the keenness with which she noticed every detail in the American hospitals, for while visiting in the homes of friends in Shanghai nothing escaped her quick eye. Miss Hughes' attention was constantly called to things that pleased the doctor's taste by her often reiterated, "Look here! We must have this in our home." "Miss Hughes and I shall try to make our home so homey," she wrote to a friend, "and we shall open it for everybody, the everyday, common folks as well as the Tai-tais."

The next addition to the hospital property was a home for the nurses, money for which had been pledged during Dr. Stone's stay in America. As soon as the funds were sent out building was commenced, and in March, 1909, the nurses moved into their new home. The accommodations of the hospital were thus enlarged still further, and moreover the nurses had a far more restful environment in which to spend the hours when they were off duty.

One who met Dr. Stone in America spoke of the great impression made upon her by the doctor's ability to do many things. The demands upon the physician in entire charge of the large Danforth Memorial Hospital are indeed many and varied, but Dr. Stone has proved equal to them all.

She is a good general practitioner. Probably the best proof of this is the number of patients who throng the hospital gates. In 1908 she reported, "Last month we saw over 1,700 people in the hospital and dispensary, and in April we saw over 1,800." A year later she wrote, "Taking the statistics for last month I found we treated 2,743 in the month of April." Her successful treatment of the most difficult diseases is all the more remarkable to one who knows the tendency of many Chinese not to consult a physician until the patient is at the point of death. Their utter lack of knowledge of the simplest rules for the care of the sick, and the dreadful surroundings in which so many of them live, produce, in those who are brought to the doctor after long weeks of suffering, conditions which are almost too terrible to describe.

The words of a fellow-missionary throw light on the difficult character of Dr. Stone's work:

"Talk of missionary work! People at home don't know the meaning of the word! Here is this plucky little woman in the midst of this awful heat--I dare not go outside of a shaded room until after the sun is down at night--treating anywhere from twenty to fifty patients in the dispensary every day, and her charity ward filled with the most trying, difficult, repulsive cases of suffering humanity. Missionary work? Why you don't even find such cases as she has every day, in the hospitals of America. How the people live as long as they do--how these poor little suffering children survive until they get to the state they are in when brought to the hospital, is more than I can understand."

Dr. Edward C. Perkins, who visited Dr. Stone for several days, lays similar emphasis on the serious condition in which the doctor finds those who apply to her for treatment. "The cases which came to the dispensary were sorely in need of help. This was, I think, the invariable rule. Such cases they were as do not often come to the observance of physicians in this country, and some familiarity with the dispensaries of four of the large hospitals in New York City, has almost failed to show such need as the little doctor sees continually."

No physician in China can be a specialist. One of Dr. Stone's letters shows the variety of diseases which she is called upon to treat. "Women come to us almost dead; paralyzed, blind, and helpless.... We have in the isolation wards, measles; and in the contagious rooms, locked up, leprosy; an insane woman locked up in her room; typhoid, tuberculosis, paralyzed women and children, ulcer cases such as you would never dream of, surgical cases of all kinds, and internal cases too numerous to mention."

A letter from a Kiukiang missionary tells of one woman who came to the hospital with "not a square inch of good flesh on her entire body." Fingers and toes were so diseased as to be dropping off, and the poor woman's suffering was unspeakable. Dr. Stone put her in isolation, and taking every precaution with gloves and antiseptics, herself washed and dressed the repulsive sores, in spite of the sufferer's protests, "Oh, doctor, don't touch me. I am too filthy for your pure hands to touch." This she did every day, until, her sores completely healed, the woman was discharged from the hospital a few weeks later.

Hon. Charles M. Dow of Jamestown, N.Y., who was taking a trip around the world, met Bishop Lewis on a Yangtse-kiang steamer, and was invited by him to stop off at Kiukiang to make the acquaintance of a remarkable surgeon of that city. Great was Mr. Dow's astonishment when the surgeon appeared and proved to be "a small and very attractive native Chinese woman."