t this time, January, 1863, every available building in St. Louis was
converted into a hospital, and the sick and wounded were brought from
Vicksburg, and Arkansas Post, and Helena up the river to be cared for at
St. Louis and other military posts. At Memphis and Mound City, (near
Cairo) at Quincy, Illinois, and the cities on the Ohio River, the
hospitals were in equally crowded condition. Miss Parsons went
immediately to St. Louis and was assigned by Mr. James E. Yeatman, (the
President of the Western Sanitary Commission, and agent for Miss Dix),
to the Lawson Hospital. In a few weeks, however, she was needed for a
still more important service, and was placed as head nurse on the
hospital steamer "City of Alton," Surgeon Turner in charge. A large
supply of sanitary stores were entrusted to her care by the Western
Sanitary Commission, and the steamer proceeded to Vicksburg, where she
was loaded with about four hundred invalid soldiers, many of them sick
past recovery, and returned as far as Memphis. On this trip the strength
and endurance of Miss Parsons were tried to the utmost, and the
ministrations of herself and her associates to the poor, helpless and
suffering men, several of whom died on the passage up the river, were
constant and unremitting. At Memphis, after transferring the sick to the
hospitals, an order was received from General Grant to load the boat
with troops and return immediately to Vicksburg, an order prompted by
some military exigency, and Miss Parsons and the other female nurses
were obliged to return to St. Louis.

For a few weeks after her return she suffered from an attack of
malarious fever, and on her recovery was assigned to duty as
superintendent of female nurses at the Benton Barracks Hospital, the
largest of all the hospitals in St. Louis, built out of the amphitheatre
and other buildings in the fair grounds of the St. Louis Agricultural
Society, and placed in charge of Surgeon Ira Russell, an excellent
physician from Natick, Mass. In this large hospital there were often two
thousand patients, and besides the male nurses detailed from the army,
the corps of female nurses consisted of one to each of the fifteen or
twenty wards, whose duty it was to attend to the special diet of the
feebler patients, to see that the wards were kept in order, the beds
properly made, the dressing of wounds properly done, to minister to the
wants of the patients, and to give them words of good cheer, both by
re