made contact with about eighty or ninety new patients each calendar day
over a three year period. Even so, his record of many hundred hours is
very impressive.^20 He served countless hospitalized soldiers with as great
a measure of sacri¤ce as could be expected from any noncombatant and
at a terrible cost to his physical and emotional health. The primitive and
often negligent medical care that he witnessed in the military hospitals,
particularly during the war’s early years, was a source of pain and aggra-
vation. Moreover, he agonized over the thousands of dead soldiers—
particularly the many unidenti¤ed disappeared, who were buried in battle-
¤elds or by obscure waysides. One feels the pathos of his cry, “the dead,
the dead, the dead—our dead—or South or North ours all, (all, all, all
¤nally dear to me).”^21 Attending the soldiers—most of them unsophisti-
cated young farm boys or city laborers, the sort of men to whom he had
long been attracted—sapped his energies, but the practice met some of
his psychological needs. With many of these soldier boys he developed an
intimacy somewhere between that of a lover and a father. Nor should we
overlook the deeply compassionate “maternal” streak in Whitman’s na-
ture.^22 Robert Leigh Davis, whose study of Whitman’s wartime service
examines the female element in persons who devote their energies to
hospital work, believes (as do some earlier critics) that “Whitman’s thera-
peutic perspective is shaped by a self-conscious homosexual sensibility.”
However, this “sensibility” is best seen as one component of his fatherly-
motherly-comradely devotion to the soldiers.^23 His compassion for the
hospitalized boys was tempered by a genuine humanitarianism and a
sense of patriotic duty. Therefore, caution should be exercised in assum-
ing a predominantly erotic motivation in Whitman’s wartime service.
There is an imbalance, for example, in Paul Zweig’s declaration that
“Whitman’s self, bathed in the erotic, fed on suffering; it lived off the
helplessness of a dying generation. No wonder these ‘contradictions’ tore
him apart and ¤nally helped to make him sick.”^24 Indeed, Whitman’s
constant exposure to disease and death and the anguish of having to out-
live so many of the soldier boys whom he had attended and who were
young enough to be his sons would have suf¤ced to cause his deep emo-
tional distress and physical breakdowns.
As a frequenter of the military hospitals, a journalist, and a poet,
Whitman felt a compelling motivation to document what he saw of the
war and to preserve the tragic and heroic milieu of those painful days in
prose records and in Drum-Taps. Like many of those who later survived
“Come Sweet Death!” / 169