"The Wound Dresser"

tonight at Millennium Park, i heard a piece by composer John Adams, entitled, "The Wound Dresser."

this work was inspired by the work of Walt Whitman. not Whitman's writing, but his "encouraging."

check this out:

"(John Adams) writes of 'The Wound Dresser', Walt Whitman spent the better part of the Civil War years in Washington, D.C., living in a series of small, unfurnished rooms, all the time supported by the meager salary of a federal clerkship. His sole, consuming passion was his self-appointed task of ministering to the tens of thousands of sick and maimed soldiers who crowded the hospitals in the surrounding area, many of them little more than unheated and unventilated canvas tents hurriedly constructed by the unprepared Army of the Potomac. Virtually every day, barring his own illness or ever-increasing exhaustion, Whitman rose early and went to the hospitals, going from ward to ward to visit with the sick and wounded young men. For those who were unable to do so, he wrote letters home. For others he provided small gifts of fruit, candy or tobacco. He dressed the wounds of the maimed and the amputees and often sat up throughout the night with the most agonizing cases, almost all of whom he knew on a first-name basis. It was surely no poetic exaggeration when he later said that during these years many a young soldier had died in his, Walt Whitman's, arms."


now THAT was an Encourager.