But soon my ¤ngers fail’d me, my face droop’d, and I resign’d
myself,
To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the
dead.)^49Whitman knew that the high death rate among the troops, particularly
in the early years of the war, was largely attributable to poor sanitation
and to crude and inept medical practice. Many doctors still believed in
the ef¤cacy of “laudable pus” and rarely used the readily available bro-
mine and carbolic acid to cleanse wounds. Moreover, a frightening toll
was taken by malaria, hospital fevers, and diarrhea, and a diet consisting
largely of army biscuit, beans, and salt meat further imperiled the recov-
ery of the injured and wounded.^50 In a later poem the persona admits that
he is continually haunted by nightmares of his “land’s maim’d darlings,”
of the “regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea, with your fever.”
Years later, as he bitterly recalled, “O God! that whole damned war busi-
ness is about nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea and one part
glory.”^51
Strangely enough, “The Wound-Dresser” portrays the persona as an
ambulatory physician who is engaged solely in dressing wounds. Judging
by his duties and his rounds of walking from bedside to bedside, the per-
sona’s conduct in this poem most closely resembles that of a “walker,” a
term then applied to the junior physicians or interns. Senior physicians
generally performed surgeries and supervised hospital personnel. The
medical historian Richard Shryock points out that “the greatest part of
(so-called) nursing duties in the military hospitals were performed by
convalescing soldiers who lacked training, aptitude, and strength to do
the work,” and who consequently wrought great damage. Thus Whitman
notes that one soldier was killed by an overdose of laudanum prepared by
“an ignorant ward master” and another by a dose of “lead muriate of am-
monia, intended for a wash for his feet.” When the army brought in
women “nurses,” mostly untrained motherly women whose venues were
restricted to a single ward and whose duties were chie®y menial, it speci-
¤ed that they be “strong, middle-aged, and plain of appearance.”^52 The
“walkers”—or junior physicians—were assigned much of the wound
dressing. Whitman had recorded his attraction to the youthful “walkers”
at New York Hospital in his “City Photographs” series early in 1862.^53 In
“The Wound-Dresser,” the elderly narrator relives his role as a dresser,
“Come Sweet Death!” / 181