lculated in this way:

"You may have twenty, forty years of useful life, if I can save you; I
shall certainly die one year sooner for the labor I expend on you, but
there will be a large gain in the average of life and usefulness; and
when you risked all of your life for the country as much mine as yours,
it is but just that I should give a small part of mine to save you."

Every man lived whom I elected to life, and Dr. Kelly, who knew more
than any one else about my plans, and on whom I most counted for aid,
has said that I saved enough to the government in bounty money, by
returning men to duty who would otherwise have died, to warrant it in
supporting me the balance of my life; but his statements could not
always be relied upon, for he insisted that I never slept, had not been
asleep during the seven weeks spent in Campbell, was a witch and would
float like a cork, if thrown from the Long Bridge into the Potomac.

In selecting a man in desperate case to be saved, I always took his
temperament and previous life into consideration. A man of pure life and
sanguine temperament was hard to kill. Give him the excuse of good
nursing and he would live through injuries which must be fatal to a
bilious, suspicious man, or one who had been guilty of any excess. A
tobacco chewer or smoker died on small provocation. A drunkard or
debauchee was killed by a scratch.

There were two ward surgeons who disapproved of the innovation of a
woman in Campbell, and especially of one held amenable to no rules. They
were both in favor of heroic treatment, which I did not care to witness,
and I spent little time in their wards. One of them kept a man, with two
bricks tied to his foot and hanging over the foot of the bed, until he
died, after ten days of a sleepless agony such as could not well have
been excelled in an Inquisition; while his wife tried to comfort him
under a torture she begged in vain to have remitted. The night after
she started home with his body, I was passing through the ward, when I
came upon a young Philadelphia Zouave in a perfect paroxysm of anguish.
Three nurses stood around him, and to my inquiry "What _is_ the matter?"
replied by dumb show that coming death was the matter, and that soon all
would be over; while in words they told me he had not slept for
forty-eight hours.

I had one place a chair for me, sat down, and with my long, thin hands
grasped the thigh stump, which was making all the trouble, drew and
p