Leaves of Grass, his poetic masterpiece, intertwined the physical bodies of men and women and the symbolic body of the nation and saw in both a capacity to embrace contradictions and diversity while still remaining united and whole. At a time of unprecedented maiming and killing, Whitman engaged in the work of healing. 1 He spent most of his time at Armory Square Hospital, which hosted the worst cases and had the highest death rate. Walt Whitman famously described his visits to thousands of wounded Civil War soldiers in Memoranda during the War, a volume with a largely ignored subtitle: " Written on the Spot in 1863–65." I want to highlight that subtitle and its emphasis on space and time-its geotemporal specificity-to ask: what did it mean to have a writer of Whitman's sensibilities thrust into the nation's capital city in the final three years of the war when it had become a city of hospitals? Washington treated more wounded soldiers than any other city, and Whitman, a visitor to dozens of hospitals, gravitated toward the epicenter of suffering.
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