ABSTRACT
Walt Whitman’s approach to hospital medicine anticipates Francis W. Peabody’s work, who explains that by their nature, hospitals are disorienting, induce anxiety, and so undermine recovery. Through what Stephen Kuusisto terms the ‘lyric prose’ of Specimen Days, Whitman vividly brings that dying soldier’s experience to his readers, even as he tells them that they may gain at best but a ‘few stray glimpses into that life, those lurid interiors, never to be fully convey’d to the future’. Whitman discovers, for many of those seized by trauma and that included himself and the nation as a whole, recovery was possible through the processes of narrative, mourning, and reconnection. In both poetry and prose – performing as his own memoir as well as a memoir of the time – he charted a path to recovery for those he visited in the hospitals, and for himself as well.
