their immune nurses from the
South, and we of the North would supply the money to support and pay
them.

This arrangement was carried out so far as could be, under the very
natural differences of a medical department of active, professional men,
taking up the treatment of an epidemic of which they knew very little
experimentally, but filled with the enthusiasm of science and hope, and
the unprofessional, fearless, easy-going gait of the old Southern
nurses, white and black, whose whole lives had been spent in just that
work.

The Red Cross sent no Northern nurses. But eighteen or twenty "Howard
nurses," mainly colored, went out from New Orleans under charge of Col.
Fred. F. Southmayd, their leader of twenty years in epidemics. A part of
his nurses were stationed at Macclenny, and a part went on to
Jacksonville. Under medical direction of their noted "yellow fever
doctor"--a tall Norwegian--Dr. Gill, they did their faithful work and
won their meed of grateful praise.

Our place was in Washington, to receive, deal carefully with, and hold
back the tide of offered service from the hundreds of enthusiastic,
excited untrained volunteers, rushing on to danger and death. Their
fearless ignorance was a pitiful lesson. In all the hundreds there was
scarcely one who had ever seen a case of yellow fever, but all were sure
they were proof against it. Only three passed us, and two of these had
the fever in Jacksonville.

When the scourge was ended we met our nurses personally at Camp Perry,
paid and sent them back to New Orleans. All that are living are at our
service still, faithful and true.

During the fourth week in November a dispatch to national headquarters
announced that the last band of Red Cross nurses, known as the
"Macclenny Nurses," had finished their work at Enterprise, and would
come into Camp Perry to wait their ten days' quarantine and go home to
New Orleans for Thanksgiving.

That would mean that seventy-nine days ago their little company of
eighteen, mainly women, steaming on to Jacksonville, under guidance of
their old-time trusted leader, Southmayd, of New Orleans, listened to
his announcement that the town of Macclenny, thirty-eight miles from
Jacksonville, Fla., and through which they would soon pass, was in a
fearful state of distress; a comparatively new town, of a few thousand,
largely Northern and Western people, suddenly-stricken down in scores;
poor, helpless, physicians all ill, and no nurses;