Walt Whitman. Specimen Days. Philadelphia: R. Welsh & Co., 1882.

Walt Whitman. Specimen Days. Philadelphia: R. Welsh & Co., 1882.

In Specimen Days, Whitman describes a New York soldier whose “wound discharg'd much” and whom “diarrhoea had prostrated” as being “very manly and affectionate.” The soldier died several days later. The story is only one of dozens that Whitman chronicled in this text during his days in the hospitals of Washington, D.C., where he comforted many Civil War soldiers and witnessed their untimely deaths.