Walt Whitman: Civil War Missionary

From: warfarehistorynetwork.com, 4-11-14

After his brother was wounded in battle, Whitman volunteered many hours helping wounded soldiers in Washington D.C.

In late December 1862, national poet Walt Whitman arrived in Washington D.C., intending to stay for just a few days. He ended up staying for the next ten years; for the first three, he was a regular visitor at the various military hospitals in and around the nation’s capital.

In “The Soldiers’ Missionary,” Roy Morris Jr.’s in-depth feature in the Spring 2014 issue of Civil War Quarterly Magazine, you’ll get to read all about Whitman’s interactions with the wounded soldiers.

Whitman’s time in Washington actually began with the wounding of his brother George at the Battle of Fredericksburg in late December 1862. At home in Brooklyn with his mother, they received unexpected news that his brother was on a list of regimental casualties published by the New York Tribune. Fearing the worst, Whitman and his mother threw together some belongings and hurried south to Washington.

While visiting his brother, Whitman was immediately struck by how many soldiers were hospitalized. “The mass of our men in our army are young,” he wrote in an article published in the New York Times. “It is an impressive sight to me to see the countless numbers of youths and boys, many of them already with the experiences of the oldest veterans.”

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Walt Whitman’s Civil War: Stories of the Wounded

By Roy Morris Jr., 3-1-17

Walt Whitman went to Washington in 1863 searching for his brother. He stayed throughout the war visiting wounded soldiers at military hospitals.

Walt Whitman arrived in Washington, D.C., in late December 1862, intending to stay for a few days. He wound up staying for the next 10 years. For the first three of those years, the great American poet was a regular visitor to the various military hospitals in and around the nation’s capital, where he devoted himself to bringing cheer and companionship to the thousands of suffering young soldiers confined to their beds with wounds, illness, or infection. By the end of the war, Whitman would personally make more than 600 visits to the hospitals and speak to some 100,000 soldiers during his rounds. In his own humble way, Whitman was also a war correspondent—not on the front lines of the battlefields, but in the rear, where the battles’ true costs were hidden away.

“A Sight in Camp”
Whitman’s time in Washington began with the wounding of his brother George at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in late December 1862. Walt was at home in Brooklyn with his mother on the morning of December 16 when he unexpectedly came across a list of regimental casualties in the New York Tribune. Among those listed was “First Lieutenant G.W. Whitmore [sic], Company D.” Fearing the worst, Walt threw together some belongings and hurried south to Washington, where the main Union hospitals were located.

For three days and nights Whitman searched in vain for his brother, trudging from hospital to hospital through streets clogged with dispirited Union soldiers and wild rumors of impending Confederate invasion. The futile period of searching, he told his mother, was “the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my life.” It did not help that Whitman’s pocket was picked in the train station in Philadelphia, leaving him literally penniless. At last someone suggested he go to Falmouth, outside Fredericksburg, where the Army of the Potomac was camped for the winter. There he found George in surprisingly good health, only slightly wounded by a piece of Confederate shrapnel that had pierced his cheek. George, for his part, was unfazed by his close brush with death and glorying in his promotion to captain of the 51st New York Infantry.

Whitman spent 10 days visiting his brother and the other soldiers in the regiment. He was struck immediately by how young many of the soldiers were. “The mass of our men in our army are young,” Whitman wrote in an article published in the New York Times. “It is an impressive sight to me to see the countless numbers of youths and boys, many of them already with the experiences of the oldest veterans.” Of the original 1,000 soldiers who had enlisted in George’s regiment at the start of the war, only about 200 still survived. Their patriotism, if not their numbers, remained high. “The men looked well to me,” Whitman noted in the Times article, “with the look of men who had long known what real war was, and taken many a hand in—a regiment that had been sifted by death.”

As a civilian, Whitman marveled at the men’s matter-of-fact attitude in the face of death. “Death is nothing here,” he wrote. “As you step out in the morning from your tent to wash your face you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless extended object, and over it is thrown a dark grey blanket—it is the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the regiment who died in the hospital tent during the night—perhaps there is a row of three or four of these corpses lying covered over. No one makes an ado.” He made notes for a new poem about one of the victims: “Young man, I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!” It would later become the basis of one of his most memorable poems, “A Sight in Camp.”

Whitman left Falmouth on December 28 aboard a government steamer bound for Washington. Traveling with him was a large contingent of seriously wounded soldiers headed for the various military hospitals in the rear. During the three-hour trip, Whitman went from man to man, collecting information to send to their families back home. It was the first humble step of a great one-man humanitarian enterprise. One of the men died before they docked at the Sixth Street wharf.

Back in Washington, Whitman found part-time work as a copyist in the paymaster’s office, where he saw firsthand the inadequate efforts by the government to aid wounded veterans. Each day he observed dozens of “poor sick, pale, tattered soldiers” climbing up five flights of stairs in search of back pay that was not always forthcoming. Many of the men had been honorably discharged from the Army, but without money to get home they were stuck in the hospitals and convalescent camps, surrounded by sick and dying comrades. Some were reduced to living on the streets.

The Shocking Conditions of Union Military Hospitals
With no particular plan or purpose, Whitman began visiting the hospitals. At first, it was merely to look in on the Brooklyn soldiers he had known before the war, but it soon became a daily routine. In the past, Whitman had occasionally gone to visit injured friends at the Broadway Hospital in New York, but nothing had prepared him for the sights, sounds, and smells of the army hospitals—they were literally a world unto themselves. By the end of 1862, there were approximately 35 hospitals in Washington, accommodating some 13,000 soldiers.

These hospitals, ranging in size from converted private mansions to filthy, mud-encrusted tents in contraband camps, were places to be feared by any thinking person. The great European medical advances in bacteriology and antisepsis were still tragically a few years in the future, and the cause and prevention of disease remained unknown. Typhoid fever, malaria, and diarrhea, the three most prevalent and deadly killers in the Civil War, tore through every hospital and camp, spread by infected drinking water, contaminated food, and disease-carrying mosquitoes. Meanwhile, the overworked and understaffed physicians continued to ascribe the soldiers’ ills to such fantastical causes as “malarial miasms, mephitic effluvia, crowd poisoning, sewer emanations, and poisonous fungi in the atmosphere.”

Sick soldiers could expect little in the way of help from their doctors. Indeed, many of the physicians made matters worse by violating the most basic of all medical tenets: First, do no harm. The doctors prescribed a bewildering and ineffective array of drugs at the first sign of illness. Diarrhea was treated with laxatives, opium, epsom salts, castor oil, ipecac, quinine, strychnine, turpentine, camphor oil, laudanum, blue mass, belladonna, lead acetate, silver nitrate, red pepper, and whiskey. Malaria called for large doses of quinine, whiskey, opium, epsom salts, iodide of potassium, sulfuric acid, wild cherry syrup, morphine, ammonia, cod liver oil, spirits of nitre, cream of tartar, barley water, and cinnamon. When all else failed, doctors harkened back to more medieval methods of treatment: bleeding, cupping, blistering, leeching, binding, and chafing.

Sharing hospital space with the ill were soldiers suffering from bullet and shrapnel wounds. Frequently, they were recuperating from amputations of their arms or legs and, more often than not, were also battling some sort of postoperative infection caused by the hospitals’ incredibly filthy conditions. Union surgeon W.W. Keen, a young Philadelphia physician who went through the war with the Army of the Potomac, left behind a vivid description of the typical operating procedures at the time. “We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats,” Keen wrote. “We used undisinfected instruments from undisinfected cases, and marine sponges which had been used in prior pus cases and had been only washed in tap water. If a sponge or an instrument fell on the floor it was washed and squeezed in a basin of tap water and used as if it were clean. The silk with which we sewed up all wounds was undisinfected. If there was any difficulty in threading the needle we moistened it with bacteria-laden saliva, and rolled it between bacteria-infected fingers. We dressed the wounds with clean but undisinfected sheets, shirts, tablecloths, or other old soft linen rescued from the family ragbag. We had no sterilized gauze dressing, no gauze sponges. We knew nothing about antiseptics and therefore used none.”

The predictable result of such hurried and horrific operations was postoperative infection. Pyemia, septicemia, erysipelas, osteomyelitis, tetanus, and gangrene were grouped together as “surgical fevers.” Pyemia, literally “pus in the blood,” was the most dreaded of all, with a mortality rate of 97.4 percent, but the other surgical fevers also claimed their deadly share of victims. Not without reason did Civil War soldiers fear doctors much more intensely than they feared the enemy. They had a greater chance of dying in the hospital than in the field.

Walt Whitman’s Hospital Visits
From the start, Whitman’s hospital visits were good therapy for him as well as the soldiers. The brave, uncomplaining young men who were fighting and dying for the Union cause restored his belief in the inherent strength and goodness of the American people. Coming on the heels of a half decade of personal drift and depression, Whitman’s experiences in Washington were nothing short of life altering. As he later told a friend, “There were years in my life—years there in New York—when I wondered if all was not going to the bad with America, but the war saved me: what I saw in the war set me up for all time—the days in the hospitals.”

Whitman prepared for his daily visits as carefully as a general prepared for a battle. He quickly found that outward appearance counted greatly with the men, and so he made it a point to bathe, dress, and eat a good meal each afternoon before starting his rounds. “In my visits to the hospitals,” he wrote, “I found it was in the simple matter of personal presence, and emanating ordinary cheer and magneticism, that I succeeded and helped more than by medical nursing, or delicacies, or gifts of money.” He wore a cheerful, wine-colored suit, a pair of hand-polished black Moroccan boots, and a wide-brimmed hat with a gold-and-black drawstring and gold acorns at the bottom. He told his mother: “I fancy the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals among the poor languishing and wounded boys, is, that I am so large and well—indeed like a great wild buffalo.” Small-town soldiers from the West and Midwest had never seen a man quite like him.

Realizing that the soldiers needed more than his mere presence to comfort and inspire them, Whitman began bringing a knapsack full of little treats for the men, anything he could beg, borrow, or buy to make their stay in the hospital a little easier. Fruit, tobacco, candy, jelly, pickles, cookies, wine, brandy, shirts, handkerchiefs, clean socks, and underwear all went into his gift bag. During warm weather he sometimes brought ice cream to the men as a special treat. These gifts he distributed quietly and informally, knowing instinctively that the proud young soldiers would automatically resist any hint of pity. He carefully kept track of his gifts in small pocket notebooks, jotting down whatever he had learned from the patients he visited—name, rank, company, regiment, bed number, ward, hospital, nature of wound, and names and addresses of parents and wives. He kept a ready supply of paper and pens on hand for those wanting to write home. If a man was too weak to write for himself, Whitman took down dictation or simply wrote the letter for him.

A characteristic entry from Whitman’s notebook reveals a typical morning in the hospitals: “Bed 53 wants some licorice; bed 6 (erisypelas) bring some raspberry vinegar to make a cooling drink with water; bed 18 wants a good book—a romance; bed 25 (a manly, friendly young fellow, independent young soul) refuses money and eatables, so I will bring him a pipe and tobacco, for I see how much he enjoys a smoke; bed 45 (sore throat and cough) wants horehound candy; bed 11, when I come again, don’t forget to write a letter for him. One poor German, dying—in the last stages of consumption—wished me to find him a German Lutheran clergyman. One patient will want nothing but a toothpick, another a comb, and so on.”

“Here Comes That Odious Walt Whitman”
Others were visiting the hospitals as well. At the time Whitman began his visits, there were 25 separate soldiers’ aid groups in operation—16 sponsored by the individual states—along with the United States Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission. Whitman admired the Christian Commission, a purely voluntary organization he himself had briefly joined, but he did not think much of the Sanitary Commission, whose members were paid for their work. Nor did Sanitary Commission members think much of Whitman. One disapproving commissioner, Harriet Hawley, complained to her husband: “Here comes that odious Walt Whitman to talk evil and unbelief to my boys. I think I would rather see the evil one himself—at least if he had horns and hooves.”

The soldiers had a more favorable impression of their unconventional visitor. Union Colonel Richard Hinton, who met Whitman at Armory Square Hospital while recovering from a bullet wound suffered at Antietam, contrasted Whitman’s easy-going style with that of the starchy Sanitary Commission. “When this old heathen came and gave me a pipe and tobacco,” Hinton wrote, “it was about the most joyous moment of my life. Walt Whitman’s funny stories, and his pipes and tobacco were worth more than all the preachers and tracts in Christendom. A wounded soldier don’t like to be reminded of his God more than twenty times a day. Walt Whitman didn’t bring any tracts or bibles; he didn’t ask if you loved the Lord, and didn’t seem to care whether you did nor not.”

“The Great Army of the Sick”
To help finance his visits, Whitman fell back on his prewar training as a journalist. Like many other American writers, he had started working for newspapers as a boy, beginning as a printer’s apprentice on the Long Island Patriot at the age of 12. By the time the Civil War began in 1861, he had worked for 14 different newspapers, mostly in Brooklyn and New York City, but also including a brief stint as editor of the New Orleans Crescent in the late 1840s. Two years before the war, he had lost his most recent newspaper job, as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times, for writing editorials defending the sexual rights of women.

Whitman published his first hospital dispatch, “The Great Army of the Sick,” in the February 18, 1863, edition of the New York Times. The article had a double purpose: to raise money for Whitman’s continued hospital visits, and to encourage others to join in the work. “A benevolent person, with the right qualities and tact,” he wrote, “cannot make a better investment of himself, at present, anywhere upon the varied surface of the whole of this big world, than in these military hospitals, among such thousands of most interesting young men. It is enough to make one’s heart crack.”

Whitman described one such heartbreaking encounter with a young Bridgewater, Massachusetts, soldier whom he found languishing at Campbell Hospital during one of his first visits. John Holmes, a 21-year-old shoemaker by trade and a member of the 29th Massachusetts Infantry, had been brought to the hospital suffering from a severe case of diarrhea. The disease, much more serious than modern versions of the complaint, affected 54 percent of all Union soldiers and a staggering 99 percent of all Confederates and eventually claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 men during the course of the war. Holmes himself was near death when Whitman found him lying untended in Ward 6 of the hospital. “He now lay, at times out of his head but quite silent,” Whitman reported, “asking nothing of anyone, for some days, with death getting a closer and a surer grip upon him; he cared not, or rather he welcomed death. His heart was broken. He felt the struggle to keep up any longer to be useless. God, the world, humanity—all had abandoned him.”

Whitman happened to pass Holmes’s bed on his way out of the ward, and noticed “his glassy eyes, with a look of despair and hopelessness, sunk low in his thin, pallid-brown young face.” The poet stopped and made an encouraging remark; Holmes did not reply. “I saw as I looked that it was a case for ministering to the affection first, and other nourishment and medicines afterward,” Whitman wrote. “I sat down by him without any fuss; talked a little; soon saw that it did him good; led him to talk a little himself; got him somewhat interested; wrote a letter for him to his folks in Massachusetts; soothed him down as I saw he was getting a little too much agitated, and tears in his eyes; gave him some small gifts and told him I should come again soon.” When Holmes mentioned that he would like to buy a glass of milk from the old woman who peddled it in the wards, Whitman gave him some money. The young man immediately burst into tears.

Whitman continued to look in on Holmes, who remained dangerously ill for several weeks before eventually recovering his health and rejoining his unit. “The other evening, passing through the ward,” Whitman wrote, “he called me—he wanted to say a few words. I sat down by his side on the cot in the dimness of the long ward, with the wounded soldiers there in their beds, ranging up and down. Holmes told me I had saved his life. It was one of those things that repays a soldiers’ hospital missionary a thousandfold—one of the hours he never forgets.”

“The Great Army of the Sick” was well received by readers and earned Whitman a congratulatory letter from managing editor John Swinton and an extra $50 for his work. Three weeks later, Whitman wrote a second article, “Life Among Fifty Thousand Soldiers,” for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Unlike the Times piece, this article was geared toward hometown readers, and Whitman took pains to mention by name as many of the local soldiers as he could. “At a rough guess,” he wrote, “I should say I have met from one hundred fifty to two hundred young and middle-aged men whom I specifically found to be Brooklyn persons. Many of them I recognized as having seen their faces before, and very many of them knew me. Some said they had known me from boyhood. Some would call to me as I passed down a ward, and tell me they had seen me in Brooklyn. I have had this happen at night, and have been entreated to stop and sit down and take the hand of a sick and restless boy, and talk to him and comfort him awhile, for old Brooklyn’s sake.”

“Washington in the Hot Season”
In August 1863, Whitman published another article in the New York Times, “Washington in the Hot Season.” The long article gave readers a good description of the nation’s capital in the midst of the Civil War. “Soldiers you meet everywhere about the city,” Whitman wrote, “often superb looking young men, though invalids dressed in worn uniforms, and carrying canes or, perhaps, crutches. I often have talks with them, occasionally quite long and interesting. I find it so refreshing to talk with these hardy, bright, intuitive, American young men (experienced soldiers with all their youth.) There hangs something majestic about a man who has borne his part in battles, especially if he is very quiet regarding it when you desire him to unbosom. I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this war practically is, or what genuine America is without some such experience as this I have had for the past seven or eight months in the hospitals.”

A longtime admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Whitman often caught a glimpse of the careworn president riding through the city in an open carriage. “I saw the president in the face fully,” he reported, “and his look, though abstracted, happened to be directed steadily in my eye. I noticed well the expression. None of the artists or pictures have caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. They have only caught the surface. There is something else there.” The two giants of the age only nodded to each other in passing; they never formally met. Whitman did attend a reception in the Blue Room at the White House following Lincoln’s second inauguration, where he observed the President in the receiving line. “I saw Mr. Lincoln, dressed all in black, with white gloves and a claw-hammer coat,” Whitman reported, “looking very disconsolate, and as if he would give anything to be somewhere else.” It was the last time he would see Lincoln alive. The president was assassinated two weeks later, an event that occasioned Whitman’s greatest poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Whitman published two other articles in the New York Times, “Our National City” and “Letter from Washington,” and the Brooklyn Union printed a short letter from him detailing the capital’s anxiety over the inconclusive military campaigning. He also worked sporadically on a new collection of poems, to which he gave the evocative title Drum-Taps. These poems ranged from the early recruiting poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!” to the poignant, semi-autobiographical poem “The Wound-Dresser,” in which he ruefully recalled his earlier bellicose writing: “Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,/But soon my fingers 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.”

Return to Brooklyn
Whitman’s own robust health gave way in the face of repeated exposure to sick and dying soldiers, and he was forced to return home to Brooklyn in mid-1864 to recuperate from an undiagnosed illness—possibly hypertension complicated by a bad cold. It was a wonder he hadn’t gotten sick before he did. “O the sad, sad sights I see,” he told his mother, “the noble young men with legs and arms taken off—the deaths—the sick weakness—sicker than death, that some endure, after amputations, just flickering alive.” Nevertheless, he returned to Washington six months later to resume his hospital visits and reporting. His final newspaper articles summed up the wartime adventures of his brother George and his fellow 51st New York veterans. “The 51st,” he reported in the New York Times, “has been in seven general engagements, and sixteen skirmishes—acquiring a reputation for endurance, perseverance, and daring, not excelled by any in the whole army of the U.S.”

His last wartime article, “Return of a Brooklyn Veteran,” published in the Brooklyn Daily Union on March 16, 1865, recounted with pride George Whitman’s return from a Confederate military prison in Richmond and his four years of dangerous service on the battlefields of Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia. “Of the officers that went with the regiment, not a single one remains,” Whitman wrote, “and not a dozen out of over a thousand of the rank and file. Most of his comrades have fallen by death. Wounds, imprisonment, exhaustion, &c., have done their work. His preservation and return alive seem a miracle. For three years and two months he has seen and been a part of war waged on a scale of amplitude, and with an intensity on both sides, that puts all past campaigning of the world into the second class.”

Of his own voluntary service as a witness to “war’s hell scenes,” Whitman maintained a lifelong modesty. “People used to say to me, Walt you are doing miracles for those fellows in the hospitals,” he told his young disciple Horace Traubel many years later. “I wasn’t. I was doing miracles for myself.” He never lamented his wartime service or what it cost him physically and emotionally. “I only gave myself,” he said. “I got the boys.” Half a decade before the war, he had written in Leaves of Grass, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” After the Civil War he could truly say that he had lived those words and helped, in his own way, to relieve the suffering.

Image 1: Walt Whitman, photographed by Mathew Brady in 1862.

Image 2: Bird’s-eye view of the Sixth Street Wharf at Washington, where Whitman arrived in early 1863. Wounded soldiers file from the paddle-wheeler John Brooks in the foreground.

Image 3: Convalescing soldiers and staff outside a Sanitary Commission lodge, one of 30 such facilities operated by the Commission in Washington during the war. Whitman didn’t think much of the Sanitary Commission.

From: warfarehistorynetwork.com

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Walt Whitman—The Civil War’s One-Man Sanitary Commission

By Roy Morris, Jr., 5-31-15

During the American Civil War, great American poet Walt Whitman was a sort of one-man Sanitary Commission—not that he would have put it that way.

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, the great American poet Walt Whitman was a man on the skids, personally and professionally. His revolutionary book of poems, Leaves of Grass, had been largely overlooked, and Whitman was spending most of his time drinking with his fellow bohemians at Pfaff’s beer cellar in New York City.

Things changed dramatically in December 1862, after Whitman’s younger brother George was wounded while fighting in the Union Army at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Rushing to Washington, Walt spent days searching frantically for George in the overcrowded army hospitals in the nation’s capital. As it turned out, George was not badly wounded—he had merely been cut on the cheek by a Rebel shell fragment and was already back with his regiment, the 51st New York, by the time Walt discovered what had happened.

A Man With a Mission
The experience changed Whitman overnight. The sights and sounds of the hospitals stayed with him, and the poet returned to New York City only long enough to gather his possessions and return to Washington. He was now a man with a mission.

For the next two years, Whitman functioned as a sort of one-man Sanitary Commission, visiting the various hospitals and doing whatever he could to spread a little cheer to the patients confined there. His meager earnings as a government clerk went toward buying the soldiers’ humble but much appreciated gifts: fruit, ice cream, candy, cookies, pickles, brandy, wine, tobacco, books, stamps—anything that might make their stay in the hospital a little easier.

Mostly, Whitman gave of himself. “In my visits to the hospitals,” he recalled, “I found it was in the simple matter of personal presence, and emanating ordinary cheer and magnetism, that I succeeded and helped more than by medical nursing or delicacies, or gifts of money, or anything else.” Over the course of the next three years, he personally visited tens of thousands of soldiers. His long white beard, plum-colored suit, and bulging bag of presents gave him a decided resemblance to Santa Claus, and the patients called after him at the end of each visit: “Walt, Walt, come again!”

The Good Gray Poet
Not everyone approved of Whitman’s assistance, particularly the members of the more formally run U.S. Sanitary Commission. One commission member, Harriet Hawley, the wife of a Union colonel, was outspoken in her disapproval. “There comes that odious Walt Whitman,” she wrote to her husband, “to talk evil and unbelief to my boys. I think I would rather see the Evil One himself—at least if he had horns and hooves. I shall get him out as soon as possible.”

Whitman, for his part, returned Mrs. Hawley’s dislike. He complained to his mother that Sanitary Commission members were mere “hirelings” who “get well paid & are always incompetent and disagreeable.” That was uncharacteristically harsh for the ordinarily sunny and good-natured poet. But the unending stream of human devastation eventually wore him down, and Whitman began suffering from headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and depression. “I have seen all the horrors of soldier’s life,” he wrote. “It is awful to see so much, & not be able to relieve it.”

The soldiers themselves begged to disagree that he had not done nothing to relieve their suffering, if only for a little while. One of them, 20-year-old Lewy Brown of Elkton, Maryland, who lost a leg at Rappahannock Station, spoke for many when he wrote to Whitman after the war: “There is many a soldier now that never thinks of you but with emotions of the greatest gratitude. I never think of you but it makes my heart glad to think I have been permitted to know one so good.”

Whitman remained humble about his hospital service. “I only gave myself,” he said simply. “I got the boys.” But in more ways than one, as Lewy Brown said, Whitman had truly lived up to his nickname: “the Good Gray Poet.”

From: warfarehistorynetwork.com

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“I Cannot Leave Them”: Walt Whitman

By Karen, 2-17-14

Walt Whitman was 43 and already a well-known poet in 1862 when word reached his family that his brother George, who’d enlisted in the Union army, had been wounded in a battle at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Whitman immediately left to find George, anxious to see him and discover the extent of his injuries. George, as it turned out, had only received a cheek wound, but Whitman’s experience searching for his brother among the military hospitals had left an impression on him. For the next three years—the remainder of the war and then some—Whitman, who moved to Washington DC for this purpose, visited wounded and sick soldiers almost daily in the capital’s many military hospitals.
While some people today refer to Whitman as a nurse during this time, he wasn’t anything so official. While he did help change bandages and definitely observed many bloody surgeries, his role was more that of a really dedicated and concerned frequent visitor. Funded by his part-time job at the army paymaster’s office and by generous Northern philanthropists, Whitman brought with him on his visits countless little gifts for the soldiers. He brought treats like apples, oranges, figs, crackers, fruit-flavored syrups, and ice cream, and when a soldier requested a specific food—from rice pudding to pickles—Whitman did his best to obtain it for him. Whitman also brought reading materials for the men: magazines, newspapers, and almanacs for individuals, and books to pass around the ward. He also provided the wounded with stamped envelopes and paper to write letters to their loved ones, and when they were too ill or illiterate to write themselves, he wrote the letters for them. In addition to these items, Whitman also passed out small sums of money to the soldiers, since many came to the hospital with no money in their pockets, and Whitman discovered that giving them even small amounts helped raise their spirits. At the end of the war, he estimated he had passed on thousands of dollars of philanthropists’ money to hospitalized soldiers.

But beyond these simple gifts, Whitman felt the best way he could help the wounded was with his cheerful presence. Disregarding whether the man was from North or South, Whitman went around the wards talking to the men and learning not only how they’d been injured but about their families and lives before the war as well. And when the men were too hurt to hold a conversation, Whitman would sit by their bedside and give them comfort in silence. He remarked, “I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it.” Whitman’s hospital visits lasted anywhere from a couple hours to all day or all night, if a dying soldier needed him that long. By his own estimation, Whitman “made over six hundred visits or tours, and went, as I estimate, counting all, among from eighty thousand to a hundred thousand of the wounded and sick.”

Whitman’s mission of mercy inevitably affected his writing. He wrote many poems about his own and others’ wartime experiences in a collection called Drum-Taps. Those poems captured the quiet, stalwart bravery of common soldiers and the close camaraderie they shared. He would also later compile his hastily jotted down notes and observations from his visits into a book called Specimen Days, which provides keen insight into life in Civil War hospitals and in wartime Washington DC.

From: spotlights.fold3.com

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Civil War Amputation: How Lives Were Saved

From: gettysburgfoundation.org

“I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. –about a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each covered with its brown woolen blanket”
-Walt Whitman
Poet and Civil War nurse,   Falmouth, VA   1862

In the winter of 1862 the poet Walt Whitman traveled to Falmouth, Virginia in hopes of finding his wounded brother. The recently fought battle of Fredericksburg had left in its wakes thousands of freezing, bloody, casualties for Union medical staff to attend to. Unprepared for the sight of a field hospital with its attendant blood and gore,Whitman described it by conjuring scenes associated with a butcher shop or slaughter house - a sight and smell which many 19th century Americans would have been familiar with. Often described as butchery, Civil War surgery, especially amputations, deserve a second look. The exact number will never be known but approximately 60,000 surgeries, or 75% of all the operations done during the Civil War were amputations. From our modern perspective this seems drastic. However, the frequency of this invasive and disfiguring procedure was one of the few ways to combat deadly infections such as sepsis, pyemia and gangrene.

The weaponry and tactics used during the American Civil War caused damage beyond the capabilities of known medical procedures. The soft lead minie ball (bullet) used in the Civil War was very heavy and rather large close to the size of a present day .58 caliber bullet. When a fired minie ball struck a soldier’s bone it smashed or shattered it.

A broken bone protruding through the skin was termed a compound fracture, while a bone shattered by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel, it was called a comminuted fracture. Compound and comminuted fractures almost always resulted in an infection to the bone, a condition known as osteomyelitis. The bone marrow, along with the bone itself, usually became infected. If the infection spread through the bloodstream, death would eventually result. The best way to prevent this was the removal of the shattered limb within 48 hours of being shot. Doctors usually had no choice but to amputate the limb because of the extensive bone damage and the subsequent infection risk.

The process of amputation was not quite as crude as common imagery has us believe. Blood loss was always a major concern when performing an amputation. Often, especially in the middle ages, soldiers were left to try to survive infection rather than risk the probable death from blood loss. In 1674, French surgeon Etienne Morel invented a light and simple tourniquet that could easily be used on battlefields and in hospitals to stop blood flow. Thus, the practice of surgical amputations became a more common means of dealing with wounds of this nature.

The use of surgical anesthetics including chloroform and ether, had been established in the late 1840’s. Anesthetics were in use at almost all Civil War field hospitals and Union army records show 80,000 surgeries being performed using anesthesia over the course of the war. Confederate numbers, though not available, were probably comparable. The phrase “bite the bullet” – or the practice of having a bullet placed between the teeth of a surgery patient who didn’t have the benefits of anesthesia - is often linked to the Civil War. In fact, the phrase doesn’t appear until 1891 when Rudyard Kipling uses it in his novel entitled The Light that Failed, and virtually no surgeons or nurses comment on the practice during the American Civil War.

The medical theory of the time stated that the further from the heart, or body trunk, the amputation could be performed, the better the chances of survival of the patient. Approximately 75% of Civil War amputees survived and recovered from the procedure. Union Surgeon Dr. Jonathan Letterman (the namesake of Camp Letterman at Gettysburg) created a battlefield evacuation system which included the formation of a new ambulance corps. This decreased the time between wounding and arrival at a field hospital. Letterman was keenly aware that speed improved patient outcomes.

As the Civil War progressed surgeons gained vast amounts of knowledge about how to make an amputation successful and became deft at performing them at times for hours in field hospitals situated close to heavy fighting. Such was the case at the George Spangler Farm. The Spangler’s farm was commandeered as the 11th Corps field hospital on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg. Dr. Daniel Brinton, engaged as division surgeon-in-chief at the Spangler Farm’s Eleventh Corps field hospital, wrote in his diary on July 5: “...Four operating tables were going night and day…We worked with little intermission, & with a minimum amount of sleep.” Division Commander General Carl Schurz toured the 11th Corps Hospital during heavy rains that followed on July 4, 1863 and noted that he: “saw long rows of men lying under the eaves of the buildings, the water pouring down upon their bodies in streams. Most of the operating tables were placed in the open…partially protected by the rain…There stood the surgeons, their sleeves rolled up…their bare arms as well as their linen aprons smeared with blood…around them pools of blood and amputated arms or legs in heaps…a surgeon, having been long at work…put down his knife, exclaiming that his hand had grown unsteady, and that this was too much for human endurance, hysterical tears running down his face.”

In April of 1863 the U.S. War Department issued General Order #105 which called for the organization of the Invalid Corps, also known as the Veteran Reserve Corps. This organization was formed to make suitable use in a military or semi military capacity of soldiers who had been rendered unfit for active field service on account of wounds or disease contracted in the line of duty.

In March of 1864, General Order No. 111 stated that the title of the Invalid Corps would be changed to The Veteran Reserve Corps. The Veteran Reserve Corps was divided into two battalions; the First Battalion was composed of men whose disabilities still allowed them to use a musket and do minimal marching. The Second Battalion was made up of soldiers whose disabilities were of a much more serious nature, such as amputees. These men were used as guards, nurses, orderlies and cooks. During the course of the war, over 60,000 soldiers served in the Invalid and Veteran Reserve Corps.

Image: Walt Whitman, circa 1863. Photo Credit: The Library of Congress

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Taking Care of Those in Need

Antietam National Battlefield, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park

In 1862, a stately brick mansion overlooking the picturesque water gap at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was converted into "Clayton General Hospital." Long tents were pitched in the yard, and by the third week of July, this former armory paymaster's quarters housed 285 patients.

"I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. -- about a load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each covered with its brown woolen blanket"
Walt Whitman

Mrs. Abba A. Goddard traveled over 600 miles from Portland, Maine to care for the soldiers of her hometown's 10th Maine Infantry at Clayton. She was named "Matron of the General Hospital." Despite the limited medical services and comforts provided by the government, Goddard worked to make the hospital as comfortable as possible. Within two weeks of her arrival, she solicited donations from civilians and received seventeen boxes filled with slippers, socks, fans, pin cushions, towels, handkerchiefs and checkerboards.

The future of the soldiers under her care worried the Matron. "When I look at our host of maimed--some without an arm, some without a leg, others minus a foot--and realize their privation is life-long . . . I can hardly restrain my tears."

In early September, the hospital was closed and the patients moved to nearby Frederick, Maryland. "The cause of this sudden removal is a mystery," Goddard reported. "I am informed that some important events are about to transpire." She did not know that approximately 28,000 Confederates were marching on Harpers Ferry and that many more wounded would soon be in need of assistance.

Nearly 10,000 soldiers passed through the Frederick hospitals alone in the aftermath of the Maryland Campaign. Many of the patients who could be safely moved were quickly transferred by railroad to the large hospitals in Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia. Many others were treated in Frederick until they recovered enough to be transferred, discharged or returned to their units.

The patients were treated by a combination of Army and civilian surgeons, volunteer female nurses, enlisted male nurses, medical cadets, cooks, and laundresses. In addition to the medical staff and employees, many private citizens helped out as they could. Supplemental food, clothing, medical supplies and various personal items were donated to the hospital and the patients by the Frederick Ladies Relief Association and other private groups.

The Poet Who was a Nurse: Walt Whitman
When the war began, poet Walt Whitman was exempt from service due to age, though two of his younger brothers joined the Union Army. Upon hearing the news of the wounding of his brother, George, in 1862, Whitman left his home in New York to care for him in Virginia. During his mission of mercy, he was overcome with sympathy for all the wounded young men he saw, many of them bound for hospitals in Washington, D.C. After George's recovery, Whitman decided to move to the Capital to care for wounded soldiers. Finding a job as a clerk in an army office, Whitman spent much of his time away from work volunteering in several of the area hospitals. Spending his pay on gifts for soldiers and volunteering his time writing letters for soldiers and changing dressings, Whitman quickly became a beloved and respected figure among the wards. Moved by the suffering of the wounded and stories of the battlefields, he scribbled poetry in his notebook as he moved among the hurt and dying. Many of these poems were included in his 1865 collection, Drum Taps.

"I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. -- about a load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each covered with its brown woolen blanket... The house is quite crowded; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that night, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, etc. Also talked to three or four who seemed most susceptible to it, and needing it." -Walt Whitman

Image: Sketch of a woman writing a letter for a wounded soldier

From: nps.gov

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Whitman in Washington

By Jamie Stiehm, 12-28-12

Among the countless Northerners shocked by the Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Va., in December 1862 was the Brooklyn poet and journalist Walt Whitman. In Whitman’s case the shock was personal: his brother George was among the wounded. He quickly packed his bags and rushed south to the Union position. When Whitman arrived at the field hospital set up in a mansion, he found a scene from hell, watched over by an imposing angel: Clara Barton moved amid screams of surgery, ministering to youths, bandaging the bleeding and soothing the dying with low-spoken words and water.

Whitman never wrote a poem about her, but Barton’s caring solace to the wounded made a clear first impression on him. Rather than returning to New York after finding his brother, the poet felt compelled to move to Washington and serve as a hospital volunteer. There he could aid the wounded and observe the war firsthand.

Moving quickly, Whitman set up a new life in the federal city, finding work as a government copyist. But he also worked as an unpaid hospital visitor to a sea of soldiers, coming late in the day and sometimes staying all night. He himself called it “peculiar.” Later, he said his Civil War experience bearing witness — he came from a Quaker family — “saved” him. He found meaning in befriending the weak and wounded, bearing small gifts, playing games and writing letters home to their families, often farewells. He seemed to believe that tangible things like a pipe, a romance book, a comb, fruit, stamps, wine, socks and underwear, along with his jovial presence, might help heal the “dismembered” Union, represented by the patients he saw.

But it was not only that. Whitman passionately loved men (more openly than any other 19th-century American artist) and a spring of affection poured forth as he made rounds to bring a bit of cheer to countless young men, their health and limbs held hostage to a Hobbesian state of medical knowledge. Though Whitman was not a nurse, some of his poetry, notably “The Wound Dresser,” indicates he may have assisted in the messy business of operations and tried to mitigate the pain afterward:

I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad

Today those words are etched on the gray marble of Washington’s Dupont Circle Metro station.

In view of the half-finished Capitol dome, Whitman stayed squarely in the nexus of the volcanic struggle to save or split the Union. His “ministrations” included consoling embraces. He felt the wrong of dying young men in a strange dusty city, unknown among strangers. Continuing the passage above, the poet reveals more of his part in the Army hospital scenes:

(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Above all, Whitman studied the stars and waves of Lincoln’s mercurial character the way a great sculptor might gaze at his craggy countenance or larger-than-life hands. The poet came to know the routes of the president’s carriage. When he saw it passing by, he stood with hat in hand. He kept a lookout in the summer months, when Lincoln rode daily along Seventh Street out to a peaceful family retreat at the Soldiers Home, three miles away from crush of his callers. Whitman was once inside the executive mansion to see John Hay, the president’s secretary. He was standing close to Lincoln, who was animatedly engaged in another conversation, but went on his way, loath to interrupt him.

As Whitman later recounted, he exchanged nods, bows and waves with Lincoln several times over a few years and saw the president shake hundreds, if not thousands, of hands at a party. But not Whitman’s. In one of American history’s closest calls, the two never spoke a word to each other. (Though it is believed that Lincoln, 10 years older, read some of the poet’s work aloud back in Springfield, Ill.)

Whitman nevertheless felt he got a good fix on Lincoln. “I love the president personally,” he declared. Well he might, because years earlier he had imagined a bearded president from the prairie, the West who was “heroic, shrewd, fully informed.” Lincoln was nothing if not a shrewd, strong outsider, which helped make him the one man alive capable of settling the old sectional divide sundering the nation.

Except that one cruel April day Lincoln was no longer alive. The commander in chief was the final, most bitterly mourned casualty of the Civil War. He died the ultimate good death, laying down his life to become martyr and legend all at once the moment the giant stopped breathing on April 15, 1865, seven hours after a single shot was fired in the back of his head. The war was won days earlier, but the Northern part of the nation was heartbroken on every funeral train stop back to Springfield. It was as if all the sorrow and weeping of the war was now met in this one man.

Whitman, too, was moved to speak, to sing on the page as he never had before. He wrote “Hush’d Be the Camps To-day,” a paean for the soldiers he came to cherish. He wrote “O Captain! My Captain,” as if he knew that later schoolchildren and families would memorize it together. But the greatest poem he wrote for Lincoln’s death is the unforgettable masterpiece, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Whitman writes in his familiar individual voice:

Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.

But he breaks from the first person and broadens the long poem to give it an extraordinary inclusiveness, making the consciousness a collective, grieving nation. Lilacs, luscious spring flowers, become an inescapable reminder of loss. The poem is almost like a wailing wall for a republic that had never seen such suffering before.

Whitman’s journey south turned out to take years, not days.

Sources: David S. Reynolds, “Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography”; Daniel Mark Epstein, “Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington”; Roy Morris Jr., “The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War”; Philip Callow, “From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman”; Drew Gilpin Faust, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”

Jamie Stiehm
Jamie Stiehm is a columnist for Creators Syndicate, covering history, politics and culture. She lives in Washington.

Image: Walt Whitman and his friend Peter Doyle, taken while the two were in Washington. Credit Library of Congress

From: opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

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Civil War Army Hospitals

From: learnnc.org

Nearly 200,000 men lost their lives from enemy fire during the four years of the war. However, more than 400,000 soldiers were killed by an enemy that took no side — disease.

From our modern perspective, medicine during the Civil War seems primitive. Doctors received limited medical education. Most surgeons lacked familiarity with gunshot wounds. The newly-developed minie ball produced grisly wounds that were difficult to treat. The Northern and Southern medical departments were ill-prepared for removing wounded men from the battlefield and transporting them to hospitals. Systems to provide hospital care for the sick and wounded had not been developed. Blood typing, X-rays, antibiotics, and modern medical tests and procedures were nonexistent.

Open latrines, decomposing food, and unclean water were the rule in the camps. Diarrheal diseases affected nearly every soldier and killed hundreds of thousands of men. Although surgeons used ether and chloroform routinely as anesthetics, surgery was performed with unwashed hands and unclean instruments, resulting in infected wounds. The most effective drugs were the pain-killers opium and morphine, while many of the other available drugs were useless or harmful. Despite these limitations, Civil War doctors achieved some remarkable successes in treating the wounded and comforting the sick.

Popular but generally incorrect images of Civil War medicine involve surgery-amputations without anesthesia, piles of arms and legs, the surgeon as a butcher. By modern standards, wartime surgery was limited. Despite the lack of both surgical experience and sanitary conditions, the survival rate among those who underwent the knife was better than in previous wars. Amputation was not the only surgical recourse available. Surgeons also extracted bullets, operated on fractured skulls, reconstructed damaged facial structures, and removed sections of broken bones.

As bullets hit their victims, shattered bone and shredded flesh became the calling cards of the minie ball. Most of the surgeons who had come from civilian practices had little or no experience in dealing with such wounds. They quickly became aware of the surgical options: remove the limb, remove the fractured portions of bone, or clean the wound and apply a dressing. Union surgeons documented nearly 250,000 wounds from bullets, shrapnel, and other missiles. Fewer than 1,000 cases of wounds from sabers and bayonets were reported.

Walt Whitman describes a battlefield hospital:

FALMOUNT, VA., opposite Fredericksburgh, December 21, 1862. — Begin my visits among the camp hospitals in the army of the Potomac. Spend a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a hospital since the battle — seems to have receiv’d only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel-staves or broken boards, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodies were subsequently taken up and transported north to their friends.) The large mansion is quite crowded upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody. Some of the wounded are rebel soldiers and officers, prisoners. One, a Mississippian, a captain, hit badly in leg, I talk’d with some time; he ask’d me for papers, which I gave him. (I saw him three months afterward in Washington, with his leg amputated, doing well.) I went through the rooms, downstairs and up. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, &c. Also talk’d to three or four, who seem’d most susceptible to it, and needing it.
— Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

Image: Nurses and officers of the U.S. Sanitary Commission pose under a tree in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Photograph by James Gardner, May 1864.

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Walt Whitman's Soldiers: "Death of a Case From Second Bull Run"

From: medicalmuseum.mil

At Armory Square Hospital, Whitman also cared for Private John Mahay, 101st New York. Mahay was shot in the groin during the second battle of Bull Run on August 29th, 1862. During the course of his treatment, it was reported that Mahay passed several pieces of bone through his urethra. The entrance and exit wounds made by the bullet never healed, and pus, blood and urine would discharge through them. In September 1863, Mahay began to weaken, and he died on October 24th. Several urinary stones were removed from his bladder at autopsy. They formed as a result of his injuries. Whitman recalled Mahay’s life and death in "Specimen Days":

“Well, poor John Mahay is dead. He died yesterday. His was a painful and lingering case. I have been with him at times for the past fifteen months. He belonged to Company A. One Hundred an First New York, and was shot through the lower region of the abdomen at second Bull Run, August, 1862. One scene at his bedside will suffice for the agonies of nearly two years. The bladder had been perforated by a bullet going entirely through him. Not long since I saw a good part of the morning by his bedside, Ward E, Armory-square.The water ran out of his eyes from the intense pain,and the muscles of his face were distorted, but he uttered nothing except a low groan now and then. Hot moist cloths were applied, and relieved him some what. Poor Mahay, a mere boy in age, but old in misfortune. He never knew the love of parents, was placed in his infancy in one of the New-York charitable institutions, and subsequently bound out to a tyrannical master of Sulivan County, (the scars of whose cowhide and club remained yet on his back.) His wound here was a most disagreeable one, for he was a gentle, cleanly, and affectionate boy. He found friends in his hospital life, and, indeed, was a universal favorite. He had quite a funeral ceremony.”

Image 1: Urinary stones removed from the bladder of Private John Mahay

Image 2:  Entry for John Mahay in the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Surgical Vol 3 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1833), 294. Reprinted as Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991)

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Walt Whitman's Soldiers: "...The Noblest Specimen of a Young Western Man..."

From: medicalmuseum.mil

On May 2nd, 1863, during the battle of Chancellorsville, Private Cunningham, 82nd Ohio, received a gunshot wound to the right thigh that resulted in a compound fracture of the thigh. The bullet was extracted at Armory Square Hospital on June 15th. Extensive abscesses formed following the procedure, and on May 2nd, 1864, Cunningham’s leg was amputated. Although Bliss had hope for a successful outcome when he submitted the specimen to the Army Medical Museum on May 5th, Cunningham died on June 5th, 1864. Cunningham’s lower-thigh bone appears here. Whitman, who cared for Cunningham, described the young man in a letter to his mother.

"I have just left Oscar Cunningham, the Ohio boy—he is in a dying condition—there is no hope for him—it would draw tears from the hardest heart to look at him--his is all wasted away to a skeleton, & looks like some one fifty years old—you remember I told you a year ago, when he was first brought in, I thought him the noblest specimen of a young western man I had seen, a real giant in size, & always with a smile on his face—O what a change, he has long been very irritable, to every one but me, & his frame is all wasted away."

Cunningham died on June 4, 1864, one month after Bliss had hoped that Cunningham might survive his amputation. Cunningham was one of the first soldiers to be buried in the new Arlington National Cemetery.

Amputation of Right Thigh Oscar “H” Cunningham” Private Co “I” 82 Ohio Vols. was wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville May 2, 1863. Entered Armony Square hospital June 15 1863 with gunshot wound of right-thigh. The ball entered on terior aspect of middle third passed backward – producing a compound fracture of femur. The ball was extracted by Surgeon in charge. The missle was a round or conical ball subsequently erysipelas of the cellulocutauceous variety occurred involving the entire extremity. Extensive absesses followed. The constitution became involved and suffered greatly from supperative and irritative fever. On the 2nd of May 1864 the thigh was amputated at the uper third which operations was performed by Surgeon In Charge. In the operation the double laternal flaps were made by transfixion. Hemorrhage was controlled by compression of the artery underneath pouparts ligament and but little blood lost. About the usual number of vessels were tied in the flaps which however were found to unhealthy – affected by neighboring absesses. Meeting at a profective centre the flaps formed a very good but somewhat conical stump.

There was found some necrosis indicated before operation by the appearance of the sinus affecting the calus only – not extending to the medullary canal. The union was complete. The fragments overlappis about 2 inches.

Since the operation the patient has been doing well although threatened with erysipelas in the stump. Hope is entertained of a succesful result – without it he was exposed to a fatal issue.
Specimen forwarded on the 5 day of May 1864
DW Bliss
Surgeon U.S. Vols.
In Charge

“He seem’d quite willing to die…”
Corporal Frank H. Irwin, 93rd Pennsylvania, received a gunshot wound to his left knee during the battle of Fort Fisher, Virginia on March 25th, 1865. Bliss amputated his leg at Armory Square on April 14th. Irwin died on May 2nd. He was Whitman’s “Pennsylvania Soldier” in Specimen Days.

Image:  Lower thigh bone of Private Oscar Cunningham. National Museum of Health and Medicine

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'The American Civil War’ by John Keegan: The Gruesome Suffering of Soldiers Exposed

From: telegraph.co.uk

In this exclusive extract from his new book, our foremost military historian, John Keegan, exposes the gruesome suffering endured by soldiers during the American Civil War, and the role of poet Walt Whitman in easing their pain.

The likelihood of death or disfigurement on the battlefield was remote from the minds of the men of 1861 as they marched away. It became an all too urgent reality once the first shots were exchanged. The first battle of Bull Run left 1,000 wounded on the field. By 1862, Union regiments were becoming accustomed to casualties of 30 per cent in any engagement.

As quickly as Civil War soldiers learnt of the probabilities of death and wounding in action, however, they learnt to avoid, as far as possible, treatment by regimental doctors, who acquired a reputation early on for incompetence and laziness. It was not understated; the staff of the pre-war medical department was ill-trained, rule-bound and rarely abreast of modern methods. They were also poorly supplied with drugs or equipment. The first hospitals were improvised, often simply a few tents pitched on the outskirts of camp, attended by untrained men who acquired the reputation of shirkers.

The Union army had entered the war with entirely inadequate medical resources. The senior medical officer was 80 years old and his knowledge of medical practice was of equal antiquity. The US Medical Service possessed only 20 thermometers and lacked almost all other medical equipment. Surgeons were posted to regiments on a scale of one per unit, with an assistant surgeon as the only other trained man. In the field they took charge of the regimental musicians, who acted as litter-bearers. They were quite without medical training and earned a reputation as rough, incompetent and often uncaring.

The delay in evacuating the wounded was often extreme. After the second battle of Bull Run, 3,000 wounded still lay where they had fallen three days after the fighting ceased; 600 were found still alive five days after the battle. It was a week before the last survivors were got to hospital in Washington. It was often preferable to remain in a barn or private house, as many did, than be taken to hospital, which were frequently sinks of infection; dirty, untidy, and overrun with parasites. Because of the prevalence of gangrene, amputation was the preferred surgical procedure. Many eyewitnesses recorded the sight of piles of severed arms and legs outside, and sometimes inside, hospitals.

The Civil War occurred at a point of transition in scientific development, so that the armies had the use of some weapons of the future, such as breech-loading rifles, but not others, such as machine guns. Military medicine was also at a point of transition. Doctors could administer anaesthetics, but they did not yet understand the germ theory of infection and so did not practise antisepsis. Surgeons commonly operated in old clothes stiff with blood or pus, dressing wounds with torn-up rags. They did not clean, let alone sterilise, their instruments and did not keep wards or operating theatres free of disease-carrying insects. Blood transfusion was unknown, as was blood-typing, and they would remain so until the end of the First World War.

In the circumstances, it was remarkable that as many wounded survived as did. The minié ball, fired from the Springfield and Enfield rifles – the main cause of wounds – was a conical lump of lead the size of a man's upper thumb joint and weighing two ounces. It penetrated the human body with ease, producing a comparatively benign injury unless it hit a blood vessel. But it frequently hit bone, which it tended to shatter, often a cause of amputation. Even worse was the wound caused by a fragment of artillery shell, which could remove a foot or a hand, or smash the rib cage. Worst of all was a round shot, which could decapitate. A direct hit from a cannonball almost always meant death.

The surgeon of a Kentucky regiment wrote to his wife after the battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864: "Citizens at home can never know one fourth part of the misery brought about by this terrible rebellion."

During 1862, the North urgently put in hand an effort to improve the quality of medical care. As with other Civil War developments, the battle of Antietam, with its huge casualty list, was the spur. A new director of medical services, the young, energetic well-educated William Hammond, was supported by the United States Sanitary Commission, a voluntary organisation that became a power in the land. It collected medical supplies, recruited several thousand nurses, and provided welfare facilities for soldiers, both sick and healthy, all over the Northern states.

Hammond was responsible for widespread reform and for choosing able men to fill surgical and medical appointments throughout the Union army. One, Dr Jonathan Letterman, appointed chief of medical services in the Army of the Potomac, expanded and reorganised the ambulance corps. The first results were seen after Antietam, when the wounded were moved from the battlefields according to a rational and disciplined schedule. Letterman, who insisted on strict standards of hygiene, introduced prefabricated hospitals, properly ventilated and heated, with single-storey wards grouped around a central complex of operating theatres and dressing stations.

Walt Whitman, a New Yorker trying to set up as a professional writer, was an early visitor to the dozens of Letterman hospitals that began to spring up all over Washington. Though he did not serve in the army and was never present at a battle, the war was to possess him. After finding his brother, George, who had been evacuated from the field of Fredericksburg, Whitman devoted himself to the welfare of the wounded. He took a clerical job in the army paymaster's office and spent his small salary on tobacco and other comforts for the patients.

By his own reckoning, he attended the bedsides of 80,000 casualties. He recorded: "The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs and bottles and powders are helpless to yield." That medicine was kindness and cheerful attention.

Whitman was to become America's leading 19th-century poet. His poem Come Up from the Fields, Father, is one of the greatest works of literature the war was to inspire and it came from his experiences as an army hospital visitor. What makes it so heart-rending is that everything in it is entirely genuine.

Whitman knew what happened to boys shot in the chest; he knew how such news affected families since he often met them on their visits to the hospitals; he knew what terrible truths the consoling letters sent to families concealed, since he had often written such letters himself. Whitman was a great poet of the Civil War because he understood the nature and purpose of the war, which was to inflict suffering on the American imagination.

The suffering was equally distributed between the two sides, and was felt particularly by those not present. The whole point of the war was to hold mothers, fathers, sisters and wives in a state of tortured apprehension, waiting for the terrible letter from hospital that spoke of wounds and which all too often presaged the death of a dear son, husband, or father. It was a particular cruelty of the Civil War that because neither side had targets of strategic value to be attacked, its effect had to be directed principally at the man in the field and at the emotions of those who waited at home.

Torturing the apprehensions of the non-combatants was a new development in warfare, produced by the rise of an efficient postal service. Before the days of rapid and reasonably certain postal communication, the only certain news of a soldier on campaign came by default, when he did not return.

Whitman caught at the truth in an entry in one of his notebooks. "The expression of American personality through this war is not to be looked for in the great campaign and the battle-fights. It is to be looked for… in the hospitals, among the wounded."

Image: Wounded soldiers in an improvised Union hospital during the American Civil War

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Walt Whitman's Soldiers: Death of a Pennsylvania Soldier

From: medicalmuseum.mil

Frank H. Irwin, company E, 93d Pennsylvania—died May I, ’65—My letter to his mother. —
DEAR MADAM: No doubt you and Frank’s friends have heard the sad fact of his death in hospital here, through his uncle, or the lady from Baltimore, who took his things. (I have not seen them, only heard of them visiting Frank.) I will write you a few lines—as a casual friend that sat by his death-bed.

Your son, corporal Frank H. Irwin, was wounded near fort Fisher, Virginia, March 25th, 1865—the wound was in the left knee, pretty bad. He was sent up to Washington, was receiv’d in ward C, Armory-square hospital, March 28th—the wound became worse, and on the 4th of April the leg was amputated a little above the knee—the operation was perform’d by Dr. Bliss, one of the best surgeons in the army—he did the whole operation himself—there was a good deal of bad matter gather’d—the bullet was found in the knee. For a couple of weeks afterwards he was doing pretty well. I visited and sat by him frequently, as he was fond of having me. The last ten or twelve days of April I saw that his case was critical. He previously had some fever, with cold spells. The last week in April he was much of the time flighty—but always mild and gentle.

He died first of May. The actual cause of death was pyæmia, (the absorption of the matter in the system instead of its discharge.) Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical treatment, nursing, &c. He had watches much of the time. He was so good and well-behaved and affectionate, I myself liked him very much. I was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him, and soothing him, and he liked to have me—liked to put his arm out and lay his hand on my knee—would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more restless and flighty at night—often fancied himself with his regiment—by his talk sometimes seem’d as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent of—said, “I never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.” At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seem’d to children or such like, his relatives I suppose, and giving them good advice; would talk to them a long while.

All the time he was out of his head not one single bad word or idea escaped him. It was remark’d that many a man’s conversation in his senses was not half as good as Frank’s delirium. He seem’d quite willing to die—he had become very weak and had suffer’d a good deal, and was perfectly resign’d, poor boy. I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpass’d. And now like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy—yet there is a text, “God doeth all things well”—the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul.

I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while—for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him. I am merely a friend visiting the hospitals occasionally to cheer the wounded and sick.

Image: Lower thigh bone of Corporal Frank Irwin. National Museum of Health and Medicine

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Walt Whitman's Soldiers: "A New York Soldier"

From: medicalmuseum.mil

Private Oscar F. Wilber, 154th New York was one among the many soldiers Whitman cared for at Armory Square Hospital. Wilber arrived at Armory after being wounded at the battle of Chancellorsville on May 3rd, 1863 and after receiving initial treatment at Aquia Creek Hospital. Wilber suffered from constant nausea, and his condition failed to improve. He died on July 31, 1863. Wilber was Whitman’s “New York Soldier” in Specimen Days :

"This afternoon, July 22d, I have spent a long time with Oscar F. Wilber, company G, 154th New York, low with chronic diarrhœa, and a bad wound also. He asked me to read him a chapter in the New Testament. I complied, and ask’d him what I should read. He said, “Make your own choice.” I open’d at the close of one of the first books of the evangelists, and read the chapters describing the latter hours of Christ, and the scenes at the crucifixion. The poor, wasted young man ask’d me to read the following chapter also, how Christ rose again. I read very slowly, for Oscar was feeble. It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. He ask’d me if I enjoy’d religion. I said, “Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean, and yet, may-be, it is the same thing.” He said, “It is my chief reliance.” He talk’d of death, and said he did not fear it. I said, “Why, Oscar, don’t you think you will get well?” He said, “I may, but it is not probable.” He spoke calmly of his condition. The wound was very bad, it discharg’d much. Then the diarrhœa had prostrated him, and I felt that he was even then the same as dying. He behaved very manly and affectionate. The kiss I gave him as I was about leaving he return’d fourfold. He gave me his mother’s address, Mrs. Sally D. Wilber, Alleghany post-office, Cattaraugus county, N. Y. I had several such interviews with him. He died a few days after the one just described."

Image:  The upper thigh bone of Private Oscar Wilber. National Museum of Health and Medicine 1000513

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Walt Whitman's Soldiers

From: medicalmuseum.mil

“I go around among these sights, among the crowded hospitals doing what I can, yet it is a mere drop in the bucket. . .the path I follow, I suppose I may say, is my own.” ~ Walt Whitman, 'Drum Taps'

The National Museum of Health and Medicine holds several photos and unique anatomical specimens that open a window onto Walt Whitman’s life and his experiences in Washington’s Civil War hospitals.

These images and artifacts connect us not only to Whitman, who lived and worked in Washington from 1863 to 1873, but also to the soldiers he nursed and to the makeshift institutions where, as Whitman wrote, “every cot had its history.” Inspired by his witness of suffering by soldiers and of caregiving by nurses and doctors, Whitman’s writings from this tumultuous period stand among his greatest.

Walt Whitman came to Washington in 1863 in search of his brother, George, whose name Whitman and his family saw listed on a newspaper casualty roster from the battlefield at Fredericksburg, Virginia. After searching for George in nearly forty Washington hospitals, Whitman traveled to Fredericksburg to find George’s unit. There, he found George alive and having suffered a superficial facial wound. However, Whitman’s personal relief quickly turned to horror as he witnessed the human costs of battle.“I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart, human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening.” Whitman’s experiences at war profoundly shaped his own psyche and his poetic vision. He sought to make sense of the personal and national trauma of the Civil War while devoting himself to visiting wounded soldiers in Washington’s hospitals.

Whitman visited Armory Square Hospital more frequently than any other hospital in the city. Located at the end of Seventh Street SW and near the Washington and Alexandria Railroad, this institution offered care to the most serious cases returned from the Virginia battlefields. Here, as in other hospitals around the city, Whitman nursed soldiers by writing down their stories, writing letters giving them small gifts, holding them, and comforting them through conversation. His purpose, he wrote, was "just to help cheer and change a little the monotony of their sickness and confinement.”

“I hear the tramp of armies, I hear the challenging sentry . . . Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood.” ~ Walt Whitman, 'Drum Taps'

At Armory Square, Whitman observed the work of Dr. D. Willard Bliss, the chief surgeon, whom Whitman described in Specimen Days as “one of the best surgeons in the army.” After the war, Bliss praised Whitman for his service to the nation’s soldiers. “No one person who assisted in the hospitals during the war accomplished so much good to the soldier and for the Government as Mr. Whitman.” In 1881, Bliss became the attending physician to President James Garfield when he was shot by Charles Guiteau.

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