[Illustration]
So I put on the silver cross, and in the Broadway Tabernacle spoke
to the members of the order, asking them to make this work theirs.
They did it at once. A committee was formed, and in the summer of
1890 it opened an office in the basement of the Mariners' Temple,
down in the Fourth Ward. The Health Department's summer doctors
were enlisted, and the work took a practical turn from the start.
There were fifty of the doctors, whose duty it was to canvass the
thirty thousand tenements during the hot season and prescribe for
the sick poor. They had two months to do it in, and with the utmost
effort, if they were to cover their ground, could only get around
once to each family. In a great many cases that was as good as
nothing. They might as well have stayed away, for what was wanted
was advice, instruction, a friendly lift out of a hopeless rut,
more than medicine. We hired a nurse, and where they pointed there
she went, following their track and bringing the things the doctor
could not give. It worked well. At the end of the year, when
we would have shut up shop, we found ourselves with three hundred
families on our hands, to leave whom would have been rank treachery.
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