Wound Dresser

This is Walt Whitman in the hospitals of Washington, 1863-1864. Not the poet of Leaves of Grass but something rarer: a man with sleeves rolled up, tending to boys whose legs have been amputated, whose fever burns through the night. The letters collected here are Whitman's dispatches from inside the Civil War's wounded heart, written to newspapers, to his mother, to anyone who would listen about what he saw in those wards. He describes the smell of chloroform and gangrene, the conversations with soldiers from both sides, the young men dying in his care. This isn't poetry, but it bears his unmistakable eye - his attention to the human body, to suffering, to the strange democracy of the hospital ward where a Confederate boy might lie beside a Union one. Whitman's letters transform him from bard to witness, from observer to participant in America's wound. To read them is to stand beside him in those long rooms, to feel the weight of what he carried home.