Besides firsthand diaries of soldiers, the most poignant scenes of the Civil War come from Walt Whitman's wartime prose and a book of poetry entitled Drum Taps (1865). Many of its poems resulted from his years in Washington, D.C. spent as a psychological nurse to sick and wounded soldiers. Whitman wrote to a friend in 1863, "The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield." When Whitman arrived at the front and climbed the river bank to the Lacy House, a makeshift military hospital, his first sight was "a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening . . ."

What is difficult to impress upon people is the horridity of war, the somber nature of its importance. Although I am not pro-war, I understand the necessity of battle due to man's inhumanity to man. Hitler and Mussolini could be stopped in only one way. Switzerland, in its unabashed neutrality, is equally responsible for the atrocities of mid-20th century Europe by merely turning its back on those who suffered and were murdered. Nonetheless, war is horrid, although we watch it on TV as if it were nothing, as if it were just another movie (coming soon to a theatre near you).

But today's standards of war are like a Hollywood make-over in comparison to the war of Whitman's day. There are medical supplies and well-trained surgeons. There are rules of war to minimize civilian casualties and "friendly fire." We have antiseptic and non-addicting pain relievers. We have the syringe. Nurses and doctors, even enemy ones, wash their hands.

Whitman, on the other hand, described his hospital in DC as "nothing but a collection of tents, on the bare ground for a floor, rather hard accommodations for a sick man - they heat them here by digging a long trough in the ground under them, covering it over with old railroad iron & earth, & then building a fire at one end & letting it draw through & go out at the other, as both ends are open - this heats the ground through the middle of the hospital quite hot...the hospitals average five hundred beds and the majority of buildings are neither heated nor well ventilated. Sanitation is of little concern."

Before knowledge of microbes and infection, there was no concern for sterilization of instruments and used bandages littered the floors. Doctors moistened sutures with their saliva before sewing wounds and sharpened surgical knives on the soles of their boots. It is estimated that hospitals killed as many as they saved.

Doctors of this time had typically completed only two years of medical school, with little or no practical training. Although medical breakthroughs were occurring in Europe, it took many years for new procedures to become common in America. Thermometers were being used throughout France, yet there were only twenty in the entire Union Army. The stethoscope was still a novelty and many surgeons would "dust" wounds with morphine rather than using injections. Harvard University did not own a microscope until after the war.

Rampant infection in extremity wounds rendered amputation as the most common Civil War surgery. According to Federal records, three of four operations were amputations. The most common operation was the 'guillotine', in which the soft tissue was cut to the bone with a large knife. The bone was then cut with a hacksaw, and the arteries were clamped and tied with silk.

Unfortunately, although Whitman understood the psychological needs of the men, it appears that no one understood the basic need for cleanliness. The lack of sanitation in the hospitals resulted in typhoid, dysentery and malarial fevers as the leading diseases of the war. The first two were spread by contamination from bedpans left unemptied in wards or the general lack of adequate latrine facilities in many hospitals.

Had enough? Get the point? As we begin to look further into the poetry of Whitman and understand these times more adeptly, it is important to note the climate of the worlds we explore. There were no "good old days". Main Street and Frontierland in DisneyWorld are a myth. Yet as long as they're not Greek, we love myths. Don't you just love Cap'n Jack Sparrow? And weren't ye glad, matey, when Will Tanner admitted his pirate heritage? Me too, arrgh. But what were pirates without the myth? Filthy. Scurvy. Evil. Thieving murderers and rapists. We love myths. We believe in simpler times and the good old days and pirates and war as something that happens in other countries far away. But dismiss yourself from the romanticism of days past, and as we go on, try to grasp what it was indeed to live during civil war times. Indeed, grasp what it must be like today in Afghanistan or Mozambique or Venezuela or...