The Afterlives of Specimens: Walt Whitman and the Army Medical Museum

IN DECEMBER 1862, the poet Walt Whitman and the surgeon John Brinton arrived separately at Falmouth, Virginia, in the aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg. Whitman had travelled from Brooklyn in search of his brother, George, who was listed as a casualty. While Brinton scavenged the field hospital's medical waste in search of specimens for the Army Medical Museum, Whitman found George alive and relatively unscathed-a shell fragment had grazed his cheek, but he suffered no lasting damage. The poet remained at camp for two weeks, crystalizing the devotion to wounded soldiers that would dominate his life for the duration of the war, and well beyond.1 Whitman spent the remaining war years as a constant presence at the bedsides of soldiers in the Washington hospitals, even to the detriment of his own health.2 Irrevocably altered by these encounters with wounded and dying men, he endeavored to preserve their "spiritual character" within his poetry and prose.3This article examines previously unrecognized symmetries between Whitman's hospital reminiscences and those of Brinton, founding curator of the Army Medical Museum. The two men led convergent lives during the war years, beginning with their mutual presence at Falmouth. Given the probability that they crossed paths at Armory Square Hospital (where both were frequent visitors, at least once at the bedside of the same man), my findings are significant not only to Whitman studies, but also to Civil War medical and military histories. Through the entwined narratives of Whitman's Memoranda During the War (1875) and the Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Civil War Surgeon, 1861-1865 (published posthumously in 1914), I explore the shrinking distinction between the human body as object of mourning and subject of scientific enquiry during the Civil War. Placing Memoranda alongside psychoanalytic frameworks of incorporation, I also analyze the hospitality of anonymous mourning and the cultural anxiety resonant around the unburied dead. This collective trauma reflects a dual ambiguity that was deeply troubling to Whitman: the anonymity of the dead and the absence or unlocatability of their graves.Whitman inhabited a landscape of diverse mourning cultures, navigating elaborate rituals that governed interactions between the living and the dead. Antebellum anatomists, elegists, spiritualists, and mourners shared a collective fascination with the cadaver that dominated the nineteenth century. The deathbed vigil became an unbridled spectacle in antebellum society and a dominant literary device. Mourning manuals read like etiquette books mandating ornate funeral ceremonies. Jewelry containing locks of hair or images of the deceased served as tokens of ongoing devotion. Demand for posthumous photographs soared as the camera became an increasingly accessible medium. The emerging faith of Spiritualism sought to continue contact with the dead beyond the grave.4During the war, the chronic shortage of cadavers available for anatomical dissection was temporarily suspended.5 Seemingly overnight, battlefield carnage transformed human bodies from rare commodities, usually obtained illegally, into abundant specimens readily available for the taking. The corpses of soldiers were appropriated by surgeons, embalmers, curators, and photographers; these bodies and limbs were manipulated, altered, and arranged to suit the particular purposes of the collector's context. Curiosity about the consequences of battle saw corpses exhibited for public consumption long after death and dismemberment. Photographers such as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner published wildly popular collections of battlefield scenes, while thousands viewed the human remnants on display at the new Army Medical Museum.6 The specimen-soldier occupied the space between science and sentiment, the historical moment of convergence at which the human cadaver was both lost love object and subject of empirical anatomical violence. …