Charles Dickens characterized tuberculosis as a “dread disease, in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the results so sure, that day by day and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine.” Wade Hampton Frost met tuberculosis in November 1917, and that encounter surely had an impact on his spirit if not his mortal part.

In 1914 Europe became engulfed in the maelstrom of World War I. When a German submarine sank the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, with the loss of more than one thousand lives, including 128 Americans, anti-German sentiment began to mount in North America. Continuing tension was fired by increasingly frequent attacks on Atlantic shipping, and the United States entered the fray by declaring war on Germany on April 6, 1917. War meant mobilization, and the Public Health Service was included in this rush to war.

On April 3, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order incorporating the Public Health Service into the military forces of the United States. The pollution of the Ohio River seemed unimportant in that moment, and work at the Cincinnati field station came to a halt. Of much greater urgency were the many public-health-related issues raised by mobilizing and training a large army in hastily constructed camps. Public Health Service Surgeon General Rupert Blue was ready to assign his officers to this duty, but there were no funds available to support this activity. The American Red Cross stepped into the breach and offered funds to establish a Bureau of Sanitary Services within its organization to accomplish the needed work. Blue assigned Frost, who had ably demonstrated his administrative skills in Cincinnati, to organize and direct this office. Frost promptly reported to Washington and plunged into the task. On April 21, 1917, he was promoted to the rank of surgeon.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, known to all simply as the Red Cross, was founded in Switzerland in 1864.