Chapter IV: A Versatile Woman (2)

From the outset the doctor's ideal has been to make the medical work as largely self-supporting as possible. Of course many of those most in need of medical aid could pay nothing for it, nor for their medicines, nor even, if they were in-patients, for their food. Others, however, could pay something, and still others were able to pay in full. Soon after work in the Danforth Hospital was begun, Dr. Stone wrote: "Our ordinary charge for food is sixty cash a day or two dollars per month. For private rooms they pay ten to twenty dollars, according to the kind of room they have. Occasionally we meet some generous Chinese who give freely and thus help a great deal our poor patients, some of whom cannot even pay for their rice. For instance, one man has paid three hundred dollars this year for his wife, who is still here for treatment, and will probably give more when she is through. Another man has given one hundred and forty dollars for his wife's treatment. Last quarter we received over four hundred dollars, and this quarter over five hundred dollars here. We are getting to have more of the well-to-do patients."

A letter written in 1905 tells of ways in which the Chinese assist the hospital financially: "It has been my privilege to minister unto many of this poor class of people with the fees I receive from the rich. So often I find in the morning I earn a good fee, and in the evening I spend it on a very poor case. Lately I have been sending a subscription book around. I first sent it to the highest official here, and it was immediately returned with fifty dollars. It encouraged me very much, for I know the work is approved of by the officials and the common people, and they are both helping all they can." Once she reported that at a time when the financial outlook was unusually discouraging, an unknown non-Christian Chinese sent a messenger several hundred _li_ with a gift of money to relieve the situation.

Patients who cannot afford to pay anything, but who can use their hands, are given sewing to do, and in this way make some contribution toward the expenses of the work. The nurses, too, who have received training from the hospital, either give their services or the money which they receive from private cases. Thus, in various ways, many of the running expenses are met on the field, but as so much work is done for the poor, the physician's salary and the larger part of the equipment have come from friends in America.

Even in the interior of China, and in the midst of the most active of lives, Dr. Stone has never ceased to be a student. Early in her work she wrote to a friend in America who was also a physician, "We feel that in order to keep up in our profession we need occasionally some of the latest works, especially since medical science is one of the most progressive of all." Subsequent letters are full of commissions such as, "I need an English and Latin dictionary very much in the work. Will you buy one--a good one--for me?" "Will you kindly buy Hyde's work on 'Venereal Diseases,' not on Skin, for I have that." Or "I should like very much to have a work on Hygiene. You know the Chinese have such primitive ideas on that subject, and if I can get a good standard book I can pick out and translate for the benefit of the people. Then if there is still anything left, I would like a small book on bandaging and massage, for I want to train new nurses. Occasionally, when you see something new and well-tested, such as articles you think will help my work, especially anything on tuberculosis, cholera, hydrophobia, etc., etc., just remember the back number in China, won't you?"

With keen recognition of the inestimable value which her scientific study and training have been to her in her work, Dr. Stone has never failed to remember the great Source of motive and power, and has ever been eager to share with her patients the joy and peace of the Christian religion. Every morning she conducts a service in the hospital chapel for the employees of the hospital, and such of the patients as are able to attend. At the same time the nurses are holding a similar service in the ward upstairs. While the dispensary patients are waiting their turn in the examining room, one or more Bible women utilize the time by telling them the truths of Christianity. Dr. Stone's own mother has done such work for years, morning after morning, among her daughter's dispensary patients.

One of the other missionaries at Kiukiang tells of going through the hospital one evening, as the nurses were getting the patients settled for the night. She noticed a low murmur which she did not at first understand, until she saw that at every bed someone was in prayer. Here a mother was kneeling by the side of her little suffering son; there another mother of high rank was praying that the life of the baby by whose crib she knelt might be spared to her. In one corner a woman had crept out of bed and was kneeling with her face to the floor; in other places those who were too sick to leave their beds were softly praying in them.

The nurses are all Christian women, able to minister to the spiritual as well as the physical. Dr. Perkins says of them: "The nurses, too, are strongly evangelistic in their thought and effort, and even to one who could not understand the language, the atmosphere of Christian harmony and the remarkable lack of friction in a place so busy and so constantly full of problems, was very noticeable."

One night Dr. Stone went into the room of a patient who had been greatly dreading a serious operation which she was to undergo the next day, to be greeted with a radiant face and the words, "Oh, doctor, I'm not afraid now of the operation. I've been talking to your God." Earlier in the evening one of the youngest of the nurses had found her crying bitterly and the old woman had told her: "I'm so afraid of the operation. You see the other woman you told me of was a Christian and of course your God helped her. I've never worshipped your God. I never knew of Him before and He may not help me." "Why, you needn't cry over that!" the little nurse assured her. "Our God doesn't blame you when no one had told you about Him. Now that you know, if you love Him and pray to Him, He will help you." Then she knelt down beside her and taught her how to pray to Him. After the operation was over and the patient, fully recovered, was going back to her village, she said to the doctor, "I am the first one in our village to hear of Jesus. Won't you come _soon_ to my people and tell them."

Dr. Stone's letters and reports are full of accounts of the way in which, from the beginning, the work of the hospital has brought the knowledge of the Great Physician to those whose bodies had been so tenderly cared for by His followers that their hearts were very open. Whole families, sometimes almost entire communities, have become Christian as a result of the medical work. An interesting instance of the way in which the hospital's influence is spread by its patients is the case of a little girl, eight years old, who unbound her feet while in the hospital, and became so ardent an advocate of natural feet that after she had returned to the village in which she lived, she and her father succeeded in persuading three hundred families to pledge that their daughters should have natural feet.

It is quite impossible to separate Dr. Stone's definitely religious work from her medical work; for while Sunday afternoons and the chapel hour in the morning are set aside by her for purely evangelistic work, her Christian faith permeates all that she does. In the first years of her practice she did some itinerating work, but now that the work is so large and she is the only physician in charge, she has had to give that up. The nurses, however, still carry it on. "You see, while I am practically tied to the place," writes the doctor, "it gives so much happiness to be able to send out workers like these and to spread our influence. As the nurses say, they will be able to send a lot of patients back to the hospital. You see the more work we have the merrier we are."

Every time an evangelistic worker goes out on the district, one of the nurses accompanies her, and with ointments, simple medicines, bandages, vaccine, etc., treats several hundred patients in the country beyond the reach of physicians. At one time in the bitter cold weather of winter a message came from a distant village where smallpox was raging, asking that a nurse be sent to treat the sick people and vaccinate those who had not yet taken the disease. One woman in that village had once been at the hospital, and it was through her that the call came. One of the nurses at once volunteered to go, and with a Bible woman and a reliable man-servant she took the trip down the river, in a little sampan, to the smitten village. During four days she treated over one hundred patients not only in the village, but also in the region round about; for she and the Bible woman walked thirty _li_ every day to sufferers in the country. While the nurse worked, the Bible woman preached, and in this way hundreds of people heard of Christianity for the first time. As Dr. Stone says, "The cry now is not for open doors, for we have free entrance into the homes of the rich and poor. What we need now is an efficient force of trained evangelistic workers to ... follow up the seed thus sown broadcast on such receptive soil." This need the Training School for Bible Women is helping to meet.

Mrs. Stephen Baldwin writing to Dr. Danforth said, "The Lord honoured your investment by placing in it one of the most wonderful doctors in all this world." But Dr. Stone is not only a physician, but an all-round woman. "She is equal to any sudden call to speak," said one who heard her often when she was in America. A report of the Missionary Conference at Kuling, China, states that "Dr. Stone's paper on 'Hospital Economics' was the finest feature of an attractive conference." At the request of this conference she prepared a leaflet on the diet suited to Chinese schoolgirls, and a few years ago wrote a very useful book on the subject: "Until the Doctor Comes."

"I observed her in her home," writes a missionary who stopped at Kiukiang for a few days _en route_ to Peking, "a housewifely woman, thoughtful of every detail that might ensure a guest's comfort. In a single month recently she treated 1,995 women and children, yet she is not too busy to be a gracious hostess. Chinese ladies delight to visit her, and such is the influence of this modest woman that the Hsien's wife has unbound her feet."

It may well be questioned, great as are Dr. Stone's achievements, which is of more value, the actual work she is doing, or the inspiration which her efficient, self-sacrificing Christian life is bringing to the awakened womanhood of the new China. The words of Miss Howe regarding Dr. Stone and Dr. Kahn indicate their influence: "They seem to be an inspiration to the girls and women of all classes. When our schoolgirls learn of anything 'the doctors' did when they were pupils, they seem to think they have found solid ground on which to set their feet." A letter from another fellow-worker stated that Dr. Stone was to give the address at the graduation exercises of the class of 1909 of the Nanking Normal School for Women at which the viceroy and "other notables of China" were to be present. Dr. Stone was greatly touched when the daughter-in-law of a viceroy once said to her that she would gladly give up all her servants, her beautiful clothes, her jewels, even her position, if she could lead a useful life like hers, instead of making one of the many puppets in the long court ceremonies, with nothing to think of except her appearance, and nothing to do but kill time.

It is a great joy to the doctor to have a part in bringing about a realization of the achievements of which Chinese women are capable, and she has been willing to make any sacrifice necessary to do this. Soon after Dr. Kahn's transfer to Nanchang had left her with almost double work, Dr. Danforth wrote that he had found a nurse in one of the Chicago hospitals who was willing to go to China, and asked Dr. Stone what she would think of having her come to the Danforth Hospital. Dr. Stone replied that while she would take her if Dr. Danforth wished, she would really rather not, on the whole. Personally, she said, she would have been very glad to have her come, but she was eager that her work should accomplish two things which it could accomplish only if it were purely Chinese: first, that it should convince the Chinese women themselves that they are able to do things of which they have never dreamed; and, second, that it should show the people of other nations that the only reason why Chinese women have for centuries lived such narrow lives is that they have not had opportunity to develop their native powers. She feared that if an American nurse came to the hospital it would look as if the purely Chinese work had failed, and that it had been necessary to call in help from America.

Accordingly, although Dr. Stone has sometimes been forced to admit that her work has been so heavy as to tax both heart and strength to the utmost, she has carried it all these years with no help, except from the nurses she has trained. She has counted no task too hard, no labour too constant, if she may thereby benefit her countrywomen physically, intellectually, or spiritually. "She does not spare herself," one of her friends writes, "she seems unable to do so, and is too tender-hearted to turn the suffering away for her own need."

The past year has brought peculiar burdens to the doctor. She carried on her regular hospital work as usual, until the disturbances caused by the Revolution came so near that all the women and children in the schools and hospital were ordered into the foreign concession. This order came at night, and by two o'clock the next morning not a patient was left in the hospital.

Dr. Stone turned over the hospital to the revolutionary leaders, and each day she and her trained nurses cared for the injured soldiers sheltered in it. The leaders of the Revolution urged her to wear the white badge which was their emblem, but she told them that while her sympathies were with them, as a Red Cross physician she must remain neutral, that she might be able to render assistance to the wounded on both sides. Her explanation was courteously accepted, and an armed guard was furnished to escort her to and from the hospital each morning and evening.

When the Manchu governor of Nanchang was captured he was taken to Kiukiang, where, in chagrin at his imprisonment, he attempted suicide. Deserted by his servants and soldiers, he would have died alone and uncared for had it not been for Dr. Stone, for no one else dared to go near him. Dr. Stone and two of her nurses cared for him until the death which they could not prevent, but which they made far easier than it would otherwise have been. It was this same governor who, but a few months before, had refused Dr. Stone the rights of Chinese citizenship because, in purchasing land for a men's hospital at Kiukiang, she was buying property for foreigners.

When the leaders of the revolutionary party learned that their prisoner had committed suicide they were greatly disturbed. None of them dared to carry the news to General Ma, lest, in accordance with an old Oriental custom, he should punish the bearer of ill tidings. In their perplexity they went to Dr. Stone and asked her to take the news to the general. Accordingly the little doctor, accompanied only by one of her nurses, went to the general's headquarters to break the news to him. It is significant, not only of the universal respect accorded the doctor, but also of the new position accorded woman in China, that these women, who ventured unattended into a soldiers' camp, were received with every courtesy. General Ma asked the doctor many questions about her work, and at the close of their interview exclaimed, "When things are settled once more, I intend to find support for such a work; the Chinese ought to help it."

Because of the disturbances caused by the Revolution, many students in the Kiukiang schools returned to their homes. The family of one young woman insisted that she make use of this enforced vacation to become married to the young Chinese to whom she had long been engaged. The marriage was unwelcome to her, for she was a Christian and the man was not, but as she was the only Christian in her family she received no sympathy from them, and the wedding was set for Christmas day. The parents, however, yielded to their daughter's earnest desire for a Christian ceremony, and her brother was dispatched to Kiukiang to seek Dr. Stone, who had been eminently successful in all kinds of operations and might surely be relied upon to tie a satisfactory marriage knot. Dr. Stone accordingly left all her Christmas engagements, and accompanied by a Chinese pastor and one of her nurses, set out, through a heavy snow storm, for the girl's home. When the wedding guests were all assembled, Dr. Stone said that she would like to say a few words before the ceremony took place, and for an hour and a half she told her hearers of the Christian good tidings. The result was that when the wedding was over the mother and father of the bride brought their idols to her, and allowed their daughter to apply the match to them, for both had determined to become Christians. The father said that he wished other people to hear the good things Dr. Stone had told them, and would give the land for a Christian school. The bridegroom volunteered to do the carpenter work which would be necessary before a school could be opened, and now the young wife is teaching a group of children who have entered this new Christian school, and in the new home husband and wife daily unite in morning prayers.

After the Revolution was practically over, but conditions were still so unsettled as to make it unwise to reopen the hospital, Dr. Stone and several of her nurses made a trip to a number of towns in the region around Kiukiang. In a recent letter Dr. Stone tells of being given a piece of land by the influential people in one of these towns, with the earnest entreaty that she leave a nurse there to carry on a permanent medical work. She could make them no definite promise, but is hoping that friends in America will make it financially possible to support a nurse and dispensary where they are so greatly needed.

Truly the Chinese women are blessed in having so perfect an embodiment of the ideal woman of the great new China in this unassuming physician, whom a friend who has known her from babyhood declares to have the most perfect Christian character of any one she knows. After his visit in Kiukiang, Dr. Perkins exclaimed: "Such a wonderful woman as Dr. Mary Stone is! I do not know of any good quality she does not possess"; and one who has had an intimate acquaintance with the college women of America says: "What a marvel Dr. Stone is! To me she is unexcelled in charm, in singleness of purpose, and all-round efficiency, by any other woman I have ever known."

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YU KULIANG

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YU KULIANG

The same year that little Mary Stone first saw the light, on almost the same day, in another part of the same city, another little girl was born, a member of the same proud old family whose line runs back so many years into Chinese antiquity. Unlike Mary Stone, she was not born into a Christian home, but it was a home where the parents truly loved each other, and one in which she might have spent a very happy childhood, had not the young father died while she was still a baby.

The mother, broken-hearted over her husband's death, decided to become a Taoist nun and devote the remainder of her life to the search for truth. With her baby she shut herself up in a little hut outside of the city, seeing no one, and giving her whole time to the care of the child and her efforts to find truth. The members of her family, which is one of the wealthiest and most aristocratic in Kiukiang, were greatly pleased with what they considered an eminently virtuous resolve for a young widow to make, and applied to the Emperor for his approval of the course she had decided to follow. This being heartily given, they built a very comfortable home for her on the outskirts of Kiukiang. The building was christened Purity Hall, and over its gateway were placed large placards announcing the imperial sanction of the life which the young widow had chosen for herself and her child.

Here the little girl grew to womanhood, knowing no companionship except that of her mother and her teachers. Her mother employed the best possible Chinese teachers for her, and she early learned to read the books of the three religions of China, that she might join her mother in her pursuit of truth. She seldom left the house, and no one but her teachers ever entered it, but day after day she pored over the books on Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism until she had read them all. She, too, became a Taoist nun, but continued in the worship and study of Buddhism and Confucianism also, determined to find the _true_ religion.

She even surpassed her mother in the ardour of her search for truth, for she spent twelve entire years, in periods of three years each, in one room of the house, living in the most absolute seclusion, not seeing her mother, speaking to no one, and hearing no voice, for three years at a time. After such a vigil she came out into the rest of the house for a year, then went back for another three years of solitude. In one corner of this room were the shrine and the altar before which Yu Kuliang knelt hour after hour during the years of her long vigil, and the idols, large and small, of wood and stone, which were her only companions. She always kept three sticks of incense burning before the shrine, one for each religion, that she might be sure not to make a mistake. In the ardour of her devotion she even made offerings of pieces of her own flesh to the idols. Her whole body, even her face, was covered with the ugly round scars caused by this self-mutilation.

When Yu Kuliang was a woman of thirty-two she learned that the Stones were her cousins, and of her own accord went to call on them. Thereafter the doors of "Purity Hall," so long fast closed to all, were thrown open to the Stone family. Yu Kuliang and her cousin Dr. Mary Stone, born at almost the same time, living, and having always lived, lives as totally different as two lives could be, became fast friends. To Dr. Stone, Yu Kuliang frankly confessed that an entire life spent in seeking truth had not brought her success. She was very willing to listen to all that Dr. Stone had to tell her of the truth which she had found, and finally even succeeded in summoning up sufficient courage to attend the Sunday morning church service. Her years of seclusion had made her so timid, and so afraid of mingling among people, however, that the first time she came to the church she disguised herself in the garb of a Chinese man. Dr. Stone gave her a Bible and she began the study of it at once, with the same earnestness and determination to find truth that she had shown in her study of the books of the Chinese religion.

After she had once gained courage to attend the church service she came frequently, no longer in man's clothes, nor in the coarse, grey cotton costume of the Taoist nun, which she discarded soon after knowing Dr. Stone, but in the ordinary dress of the Chinese woman. She became a frequent visitor to the hospital, too, where she loved to follow Dr. Stone from ward to ward, or to sit beside her in the dispensary as she cared for the suffering women and children who flocked there daily.

Finally Dr. Stone invited her to come to her for a week's visit, hardly daring to hope that she would do so; for she had never, since entering "Purity Hall" as a baby, spent a night outside of it. But she consented, and gladly drank in all that Dr. Stone and the doctor's mother told her of the truth which she had so long sought. One day soon after she had gone home, when Dr. Stone was calling on her and her mother, the mother drew Dr. Stone aside and said, "Since my daughter came back from your house she hasn't been upstairs to see the idols once." After years of ceaseless devotion to them, Yu Kuliang had forsaken her idols, and was turning toward the living God. Soon afterward, when it was necessary for Dr. Stone to go to America for an operation, and for Miss Hughes, who was in charge of the Bible Woman's Training School, to accompany her, Yu Kuliang came and asked that she might enter the school when Miss Hughes returned from America. But when Dr. Stone and Miss Hughes returned to China, they found Yu Kuliang suffering from tuberculosis. The long years of self-inflicted imprisonment had left her with no vitality to resist, and the disease was making rapid progress.

Soon after the doctor's return, Yu Kuliang's mother went away for a visit of some days. One afternoon during her absence, when Dr. Stone and Miss Hughes were calling on Yu Kuliang, she told them that she was studying the Bible, and trying to pray, and added: "I never go near the idols any more. They are all upstairs in my old cell." Dr. Stone at once said: "If you no longer believe in the idols, get rid of them. Give them to us." Yu Kuliang assented immediately, saying, "Take them if you want to," and went upstairs with Dr. Stone to get them. They brought down a Buddha and a goddess of mercy, which, after a few moments of further talk and prayer, Dr. Stone and Miss Hughes took away with them, Yu Kuliang watching them without a murmur.

The next day Dr. Stone and her mother went to see Yu Kuliang again, and with her consent and approval chopped to pieces a huge wooden idol, which was too large to carry away. When they were wondering what they should do with the stump of the body, Yu Kuliang exclaimed, "Throw the horrid thing into the ditch!" Thus passed out of her life the idols to which she had prayed for hours at a time, before which she had burned numberless sticks of incense, beside which she had lived and slept, and which she had made her most constant companions all the years of her life. The old temple bell, which had for years been used to call the gods from sleep, was given to Dr. Stone on the same day.

But when Yu Kuliang's mother returned she was furiously angry--not at the daughter to whom she was devoted, but at those who had turned her away from her idols. Dr. Stone took the old woman's hands in hers and pleaded with her: "You know your daughter does not believe in idols, you know the misery of her life, you know how she longs for peace; and as long as you harbour the idols in your home, Jesus cannot come into her heart and dwell there." The old woman at once broke out, in the tones of one taking the part of an injured friend, "But if your God is such a mighty one, and has the tens of thousands of followers you tell us He has, why should He be jealous of our poor little idols and those who worship them?"

Dr. Stone did not interrupt the tirade which was now poured forth, but picked up a piece of wood and a pebble from the floor, and when the old woman waited for her to answer, quietly replied to the pebble and bit of wood in her hand. Finally the woman said, "Why don't you answer me? You have come to see me, and perhaps I have been rude, but you are my relative and I want to be friends with you." Still Dr. Stone did not answer, but went on talking to the stone and wood, until the old woman lost patience and exclaimed, "What nonsense is this!"

Then Dr. Stone put her arm around her and answered, "If you think it is nonsense for me to talk to the stone and wood in your house, instead of giving you attention, how do you think the Heavenly Father feels,--the one who created you, the one who is your Father--when you satisfy yourself with images of wood and stone instead of giving that love and devotion to Him?" Before Dr. Stone left the young women knelt in prayer, but the mother would not join them.

Later, with her mother's consent, Yu Kuliang went to the hospital, and there spent four of the ten last days of her life, in the companionship of her cousin. Dr. Stone gave her every minute that could be spared from her hospital duties, telling her of the glad new life which she was soon to enter, and praying with her. Many times Yu Kuliang tried to leave the bed to kneel with Dr. Stone, but the doctor explained to her that her prayers were just as acceptable where she was, and that she was too weak to kneel. "Those four days in the hospital with cousin were the happiest in my life," she told her mother when she returned to her home.

When she knew that she could not get well she insisted, weak as she was, upon being dressed and having her photograph taken, for all the photographs which she had had before were in the dress of the Taoist nun, and she wanted to have one taken after she had become a Christian.

Just before her death she said to her mother, "Mother, there is nothing in this life of ours, nothing! We were all wrong. I'm so glad it is over and now I am not at all afraid, for I am going to that beautiful place." And then, her lifelong quest at length crowned with success, she went to behold the face of Him who is the Truth.

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ANNA STONE