In 1911, Emily graduated from the Roosevelt Hospital School of Nursing in New York. In August 1914, she was on holiday in Paris when she heard news of the outbreak of war. Instead of returning home, she travelled to London where she joined the first group of relief workers to leave England for Serbia, on August 12th. For three months she worked under appalling conditions in a Military Hospital in Kragujevac, treating victims of one of the first battles of the War. She then returned home to raise funds for the beseiged Serbs, returning in February 1915. Along with an English friend, she arrived with truckloads of supplies donated by the ARC, into the midst of a typhus epidemic. They were asked to take them to Valjevo, the centre of the epidemic, where the mortality rate was 75%. Although they were warned that they would be dead in a month if they went, they left anyway. Three weeks later, the prediction nearly came true when they both caught typhus. They were saved only by the dedicated nursing of their POW orderlies.

In January 1916, Emily became one of the first ARC workers to reach the shores of Albania. She tended starving Serbian soldiers and civilians who survived the Retreat over the mountains in winter to the coast, to escape their Austrian, German and Bulgarian pursuers. She later accompanied some of the refugees to safety in France through submarine and mine-infested waters. On one such trip, her ship was bombed from the sky by the Austrians. On another, she dealt single-handedly with an on-board outbreak of cholera. She is credited personally with having saved hundreds of lives.

During the course of the War, the indefatigable Emily worked independently, doing anything that needed to be done. Later in 1916, she established a hospital on Corfu where she continued to work with victims of the Retreat. The following year, she worked with starving women and children in Macedonia, distributing ARC supplies. Later in the War, she worked briefly with the ARC-run Children's Hospital for the Repatriated in France and then with the ARC Italian Commission.

After the War, she returned to Belgrade where she undertook canteen work with returning Serbian soldiers. She then helped run a camp outside of Belgrade for 400 neglected children. Finally, in 1920, she joined the ARC Balkan Commission in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik). In 1921, she returned home only to leave the following year for the Volga famine front in revolutionary Russia.

The record of her life then disappears into obscurity until 1951, when she began working as a nurse in Pasadena, California. It does not appear that life was kind to Emily, who never married. She died in hospital in Pasadena in 1966 after she developed pneumonia following a fall. The only reference made in her obituary to her heroic work was to say that she had been an "American Red Cross nurse". When she was cremated, no one claimed her ashes. Along with similarly unclaimed ashes, hers are buried in an unmarked grave in Pomona Cemetery, Chino, California.