While the sewing was in progress in one tent, I helped attend the cases in the hospital tents, and made daily calls when necessary on patients who were unable to come to me. My experience in Hahnemann Hospital, Chicago, fitted me for this part of the work. In all this work the lack of suitable supplies had to be overcome. As soon as our busiest season had passed and the sickness had abated, I opened a free school in one room of our house, expecting to teach reading, writing and arithmetic to ten pupils. The attendance rose almost immediately to forty and we gave up another room to the use of the school, and I had one of the older pupils assist me with the younger ones. To Mr. Proudfit, of Morristown, N.J., are due our thanks for his generous contributions, enabling us to purchase slates, books and other school supplies.
In introducing the dual reports of Dr. E.W. Egan, I imagine that I realize something of the feeling of the Queen of Sheba when she proclaimed that the half had not been told. The practical, unswerving and unique method of procedure pursued by Dr. Egan with these thousands of ignorant, hungry wards and waifs would constitute an interesting study for the most advanced philanthropist. The problem, as he tersely states it, of how to make thirty thousand dollars feed and shelter thirty thousand people a year, was not easily solved; and yet, largely under his original calculation and undeviating faithfulness to his own plans, it was solved, and how successfully, all the years from that time to this have testified. The medical aid which he established among these poor, deluded sufferers was as if an advanced clinic from his _Alma Mater_, Jefferson College, or the University of Pennsylvania, had been suddenly opened in their midst. The old dislocated joints, broken bones, tumors, internal diseases, carried about and dragged on through years of pain, disappeared; they literally took up their beds and walked. Their faithful hearts, like their eyes, followed him in admiring confidence, as with hurried step and quick glance he passed among the distributers of the warehouse; and if he told them that a pound of meat and a peck of grits was enough for a week--all they could have and must be supplemented either by work, if obtainable, or fish or game, if it could be caught--there was no complaint, no demur: "The doctor said so, and it was all right."