the case.

Two days after Surgeon Baxter came, with a copy of that letter, and told
me he had been ordered to discharge me on account of it. I spoke of the
men who must die if I left, and he was sorry but had no option. Then he
bethought him that maybe I might get the Surgeon-General to permit me to
remain, at least until the cases of my special patients were settled;
otherwise I must leave the hospital that day. He was sorry I had dated
the letter from Campbell, had it not been for this, he could use his
influence to sustain me; but professional etiquette forbade him to
harbor or countenance one who spoke unfavorably of a brother-surgeon. In
other words, by living in a hospital I became one of a ring, bound to
keep hospital secrets, and use only words of commendation in speaking or
writing of anything I saw.

I took a street car and proceeded to the office of the
Surgeon-General--saw the man who held the lives of my patients in his
hands, ate the only piece of humble pie that over crossed my lips, by
apologizing for telling the truth, and got permission to go back to the
men who looked to me for life.

I have felt that I made a great mistake--felt that if I had then and
there made war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt, against the
whole system of fraud and cruelty embodied in the hospital service, I
should have saved many more lives in the end. Even while I talked to the
head of that nest of corruption, and listened to his inane platitudes
about my duty as an inmate of a hospital to report abuses to him, and
"the regular way of proceeding," I did want to hurl the gauntlet of an
irregular defiance into his plausible face, but the pleading eyes in
Campbell held me; I could not let those men die, and die they must if I
must leave them.

Nobody denied the truth of my statements about Douglas Hospital, and I
never learned that any one objected to the facts or their continuance.
It was only their exposure which gave offense.

This letter made me an object of dread. Folks never knew what I might
see or say next; and there soon arose another trouble about my living in
Campbell; for Miss Dix objected, claimed that it was an infringement on
her authority. Then again, there were others who could not see why there
should be but one female nurse in Campbell. Dr. Baxter, by admitting me,
had abandoned his ground, acknowledged that men alone could not manage a
first-class hospital; and having discovered his mistake, was b