The Wound Dresser

During the Civil War, Walt Whitman spent years visiting wounded and dying soldiers in Washington's makeshift hospitals, dressing wounds, writing letters home for the illiterate, and sitting with men through their final hours. The Wound Dresser gathers the poems and letters born from that experience - tender, unsparing, and utterly without sentimentality about what he saw. It stands as one of the most intimate first-hand accounts of war's human cost ever written by a major poet, and a portrait of Whitman at his most compassionate.