1
There was indeed a long foreground to Whitman’s sympathetic service in
Washington’s military hospitals. The prose sketches he wrote as a young
man were ¤lled with compassionate scenes of suffering and dying; he had
possibly assisted victims of a New York City cholera epidemic; and in the
years preceding the Civil War he had often visited the hospitalized ¤re-
men and omnibus drivers who suffered frequent, and often fatal, injuries.
From the early 1850s onward, he visited hospitals in Brooklyn and New
York, familiarizing himself with the patients’ injuries and ailments, be-
coming an amateur critic of medical practice, and developing an admira-
tion for the young doctors who attended the patients. “I suppose that I
learned to nurse suffering humanity and not to be afraid of wounds, or
manifestations of pain by nursing the sick or injured stage drivers,” he
recalled.^1 Something in his nature made him bond and empathize with
suffering and dying men. He was drawn to deathbeds in the New York
and Washington hospitals in no small measure by the opportunities they
afforded him to observe the ways in which men endured pain and faced
death. Thus, after the outbreak of the Civil War, when hundreds of in-
jured and dying soldiers were being shipped to the New York hospitals
on a contract basis with the army, he visited many of them and listened
to their accounts of the military actions in which they had participated.
And, in at least a couple of instances, he wove elements of their stories
into the poems he incorporated into the seventy-two-page collection of
war poems that he published in 1865 as Drum-Taps^2 For more than two
critical years, during the war and after, Whitman served as a volunteer
visitor in Washington’s military hospitals, where he befriended ailing and
dying soldiers, comforting them, bringing them the small gifts and items