So far from decreasing in number after the medical force had been lessened by half, the stream of patients became larger than ever. A few weeks after Dr. Kahn had gone, Dr. Stone said, in a letter to Dr. Danforth: "For a long time I have been wanting to write to you, but have been so pressed with work that I had to let my correspondence suffer. Now I find that I must write to you to let you know how crowded we are already, at this season when we generally have a scarcity of patients, as it is Chinese New Year. Now that our work is better known we seem to draw a better class of people. I don't mean very rich people, but the well-to-do, thrifty class, who earn their way by labour. Just now I have to accommodate seven private patients who are paying their own way, with only two private rooms at my disposal. So what do you think I do? I had to put one in our linen room, one in the sewing room, one in a bathroom, and finally, as a last resort, we had to put one in the nurses' dining-room.... We generally have to put patients on the floor in summer, but I am afraid we will not have enough room to accommodate more even on the floor."
Dr. Stone's dispensary patients soon averaged a thousand a month, and as the people's confidence grew, her surgical work also became much heavier. In 1906 she reported: "In looking over the record for the year we realize that we have advanced decidedly in gaining confidence with the people. Tai-tais (ladies of rank) who formerly refused operations, returned to us for help."
Often her work kept her busy far into the night and she not infrequently fell asleep from sheer exhaustion as she was carried home, in her sedan chair, from some difficult case in the country. Yet her work was well done. The tribute of a fellow-missionary was well deserved: "Dr. Stone is a tower of strength in herself and with her trained assistants carries the large work here nobly. She has been eminently successful in surgical cases and is having more and more to do in this line." Another, working in a different station, wrote, "It was my happy fortune to be the guest of another ideal Chinese woman, Dr. Mary Stone, at Kiukiang. I saw her in her model hospital, where every little wheel of the complicated machinery was adjusted to perfect nicety."
As the work grew, it became evident that larger accommodations would soon be imperative, and Dr. Stone succeeded in securing some additional land. The first addition was a lot which she had long desired to enclose within the hospital grounds. For some time she was unable to do this because of a road which ran between, but in 1905 the road was moved to the other side of the lot, at her petition, and the land was included within the hospital compound. "Most of the neighbours have been patients and are friendly," one of her letters reports. "When the magistrate came to see about moving the road to the other side of the lot only one man objected. He was soon pacified by the magistrate's remark that 'the hospital here is for the public good, and when it is in our power to do it a service, we should gladly do it.'" Another piece of land was purchased during the same year, by money raised entirely from the Chinese.
The next addition greatly delighted Dr. Stone's heart. Adjoining the hospital was a temple known as "The White Horse Temple." This was so close to the hospital that it made one of the wards on that side damp and dark, and, moreover, the noisy crowds of people who thronged it, and the beating of the temple gongs, made it a most undesirable neighbour for a hospital. Immediately after the annual meeting at which Dr. Stone had been enabled to report the purchase of the other lots, a cablegram came from America with the good news that $1,000 had been secured for the purchase of the temple and the lot on which it stood. Purchasing a temple is quite sure not to be an easy task, but in spite of many hindrances Dr. Stone succeeded in securing the lot and in making what she gleefully termed "a real Methodist conversion" of the temple into an isolation ward.
In 1896 Dr. Stone had landed in China and with Dr. Kahn begun medical work in a small, rented Chinese building. In 1906 she found herself in sole charge of a large, finely equipped hospital for women and children, with a practice which was increasing so rapidly as to make constant additions to the hospital property necessary.
