The Mayor of Jacksonville had made an appeal for doctors and nurses, which had been quickly responded to, and they were doing everything possible to attend to the rapidly increasing number of patients. On the formation of the Red Cross Society of New Orleans in 1893, it had been carefully and wisely arranged that in case of yellow fever becoming epidemic in any place, no unacclimated persons, or those not immune, should be sent as assistants by the Red Cross. New Orleans was the home of the famous "Old Howard Association," that had won its reputation and worn its grateful renown from the horrors of Memphis to the present time. This body freely united with the Red Cross of New Orleans, and it was arranged that the southern states, through this society, should provide all Red Cross nurses for yellow fever, and that the northern portion of the country should raise the money to pay and provide them. We felt this to be a security, and an immediate provision which the country had never before known. Fearing that this might not, at its first inception, be fully understood, I called at once on Dr. Hamilton, then in charge of the Marine Hospital, explaining it to him, and offering all the nurses that could be required, even to hundreds, all experienced and organized for immediate action. Perhaps it was not strange that a provision so new and so unknown in the sad history of plagues and epidemics, should have seemed Eutopian, and as such been brushed aside as not only useless, but self-seeking and obtrusive. Like the entire organization of which it was a part, it had to wait and win its way against custom or even prejudice, by honest worth and stern necessity. It was the "old, old story." The world takes reform hard and slow. As it was, however, we did what we could. Headquarters were established at the Riggs House in Washington. The good hearted people of the north who felt that they must go to Florida, had by some means gotten the idea that they must have a pass from the Central Committee of the Red Cross in order to go. They came to us in hundreds and were mercifully held back from a scourge for which they would have been both food and fuel. Whilst the entire people of the country in pity and horror at the reports received, were holding meetings, raising money, and pouring funds like water into the doomed city of Jacksonville, where the scourge had centered, and to which every effort was made to confine it. Not realizing the opposition there might prove to be to our nurses, we called upon their old time leader, Colonel F.R. Southmayd, the efficient secretary of the Red Cross Society of New Orleans, instructing him to enlist a body of nurses and take them at once to the fever district. He enlisted thirty, both men and women, white and colored, took a part with him, the remainder following next day.