According to the present plan, Carroll and I will be quartered at Camp Columbia. We propose to bring with us our microscopes and such other apparatus as may be necessary for the bacteriological and pathological work. If, therefore, you will promptly send me a list of the apparatus on hand in your laboratory, it will serve as a very great help in enabling us to decide as to what we should include in our equipment. Any suggestions that you may have to make will be much appreciated. Carroll and I expect to leave New York, on transport, between the 15th and 20th of June and are looking forward, with much pleasure, to our association with you and Lazear in this interesting work. As far as I can see we have a year or two of work before us. Trusting you will let me hear from you promptly, and with best wishes, Sincerely yours, (Signed) WALTER REED On the afternoon of June 25, 1900, the four officers met for the first time in their new capacity, on the veranda of the officers' quarters at Columbia Barracks Hospital. We were fully appreciative of the trust and aware of the responsibility placed upon us and with a feeling akin to reverence heard the instructions which Major Reed had brought from the surgeon general; they comprised the investigation also of malaria, leprosy and unclassified febrile conditions, and were given with such detail and precision as only a man of General Sternberg's experience and knowledge in such matters could have prepared. After deciding upon the first steps to be taken, it was unanimously agreed that whatever the result of our investigation should turn out to be, it was to be considered as the work of the board as a body, and never as the outcome of any individual effort; that each one of us was to work in harmony with a general plan, though at liberty to carry out his individual methods of research. We were to meet whenever necessary, Drs. Reed, Carroll and Lazear to remain at the Barracks Hospital and I to stay in charge of the laboratory in Havana, at the Military Hospital, where I also had a ward into which yellow-fever cases from the city were often admitted. Work was begun at once. Fortunately for our purpose, an epidemic of yellow fever existed in the town of Quemados, in close proximity to the military reservation of Camp Columbia. Even before the arrival of Reed and Carroll, Lazear and I had been studying its spread, following the cases very closely; subsequently a few autopsies were made by me, Carroll making cultures from the various tissues and Lazear securing fragments for microscopical examination; a careful record was kept and the results noted; cases gradually became less in number as the epidemic slowly died out, about the middle of August.