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In December 1862, after the Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Whitman traveled to the Virginia front at Falmouth to find his wounded brother George. Outside the brick mansion used as a field hospital he saw a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms and hands at the foot of a tree, about a full load for a one-horse cart, with dead bodies nearby covered in brown blankets. That sight turned his visit into years of volunteer hospital work in Washington.
Whitman argues that official histories keep the battles, generals and strategy and lose the actual war. That actual war was the private suffering, courage and anonymous death of ordinary soldiers in camps and hospital wards. Because this experience lives in fragments and in the memories of the dying, it disappears unless someone records it in close, specific notes as it happens.
Whitman held that for wounded and homesick soldiers, a steady visitor's personal attention healed as much as the surgeon's treatment. He called this 'magnetism.' He delivered it through small, individually chosen gifts such as oranges, tobacco, stamps, writing paper and a few coins, and through writing letters home for men who could not write them. The healing effect came from being recognized as a particular person, not from how much the gifts were worth.
After a paralytic stroke in 1873, Whitman recorded his partial recovery at Timber Creek, New Jersey. He described it as a daily physical practice: sun-bathing naked, wrestling with young saplings, and paying close attention to birds, insects, trees and weather. Read this way, close observation of the natural world is a form of rehabilitation for body and mind, and it works as the counterweight to the ruin he had witnessed in the wards.