I sing the body electric

"The quintessential American poet Walt Whitman produced eight different versions of his magnum opus Leaves of Grass. Each was a labor of love, not only in terms of the additions to the text, but in the physical details of each edition. If I were a collector, I would love to collect each edition in the development of Whitman’s career. Each edition has its own aesthetic and its own story. But I would especially like to find the 1881 Suppressed Issue."

— Rebecca Romney, Aldine by Rebecca Romney
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"No one had previously looked specifically at the differing responses in the brain to poetry and prose. In research published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, the team found activity in a 'reading network' of brain areas which was activated in response to any written material. But they also found that more emotionally charged writing aroused several of the regions in the brain which respond to music. These areas, predominantly on the right side of the brain, had previously been shown as to give rise to the 'shivers down the spine' caused by an emotional reaction to music.
     When volunteers read one of their favourite passages of poetry, the team found that areas of the brain associated with memory were stimulated more strongly than ‘reading areas,’ indicating that reading a favourite passage is a kind of recollection.
     In a specific comparison between poetry and prose, the team found evidence that poetry activates brain areas, such as the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes, which have been linked to introspection."
— University of Exeter Medical School
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Grudging Witnesses

"Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman served as nurses and eyewitness reporters in the hideous Union hospitals in Washington, D. C. Alcott contracted typhoid in the septic wards and wrote Little Women, about the daughters of a father wounded in the war, while treating herself with mercury. Whitman ministered to the needs of wounded soldiers while also keeping a careful visual record of everything he saw, 'this other freight of helpless worn and wounded youth,' as he wrote to Emerson. 'Doctors sawed arms & legs off from morning till night,' he reported in his journal. He was dismayed to see 'a heap of feet, arms, legs, etc., under a tree in front of a hospital.' As he moved from bed to bed in the overcrowded wards, he was shocked by the youth of the victims. 'Charles Miller, bed 19, company D, 53rd Pennsylvania, is only sixteen years of age, very bright, courageous boy, left leg amputated below the knee.'
     The remarkable medical photographs of the Civil War surgeon-photographer Reed Bontecou—now published in their entirety for the first time [Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography By R.b. Bontecou by Stanley B. Burns] and recently shown at The Robert Anderson gallery in New York—bring us closer still. Bontecou, from Troy, New York, was a classifier of seashells and an ornithologist who had traveled in the Amazon before the war collecting specimens. A pioneer in surgical procedures known for the dexterity and speed of his operations, he was also a photographer of genius. His iconic image, 'A Morning’s Work,' shows a pile of amputated legs he himself had sawed off earlier that day."
— Christopher Benfey, The New York Review of Books
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"A remarkable number of well known authors were ambulance drivers during World War I. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Somerset Maugham. Robert Service, the writer of Yukon poetry including The Shooting of Dan McGrew, and Charles Nordhoff, co-author of Mutiny On the Bounty, drove ambulances in the Great War. [...]
     If the list were expanded to include those working in medically related fields during the war, such names as Gertrude Stein, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and E.M. Forster could be added."
— firstworldwar.com
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