fitofpique:

“[Walt] Whitman became a tireless hospital visitor, spending seven or eight hours each day ministering to patients, chiefly in Washington, D.C., where almost fifty thousand men lay sick and wounded. His efforts were less medical than consolatory; he provided rice puddings, small amounts of spending money, stamped envelopes and stationery, peaches, apples, oranges, horseradish, undershirts, socks, soap, towels, oysters, jellies, horehound candy—and love, comfort, and “cheer.” And he himself wrote hundreds of letters—often, he reported, more than a dozen a day—for soldiers unable to do this for themselves. After suffering with his family the torments of uncertainty about George’s fate, Whitman understood well the importance of communication between battle and home front. “I do a good deal of this,” he wrote to the New York Times, “writing all kinds, including love letters…I always encourage the men to write, and promptly write for them.” He often wrote, too, to inform relatives of soldiers’ deaths. A revolutionary poet—Leaves of Grass has been said to represent “an absolute discontinuity with the traditions of English verse”—Whitman introduced no innovations to the genre of the condolence letter. Instead he provided families with the information they expected and needed:
‘Your son, Corporal Frank H. Irwin, was wounded near Fort Fisher, Virginia, March the 25, 1865…He died the first of May…Frank…had everything requisite in surgical treatment, nursing &c…He was so good and well-behaved…At…times he would fancy himself talking…to children or such like, his relatives I suppose, and giving them good advice…He was perfectly willing to die…and was perfectly resign’d…I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good.’”

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Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic Of Suffering, Ch. 4 “Naming” (via sonnywortzik)

Here’s what’s engraved in the curving granite wall above Dupont’s Q Street entrance:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections, Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night – some are so young;
Some suffer so much – I recall the experience sweet and sad…

The words come from a poem called “The Dresser” in a book Walt Whitman published in 1865 titled “Drum-Taps.”

…[Whitman] comforts where he can and finds himself silently calling upon death to take those who are suffering the most.

Whitman knew what he was writing about. He’d traveled south from his home in Brooklyn in 1862 to look for his brother George,
who had been wounded fighting for the Union. Walt found George alive
and well at a camp across from Fredericks-burg. Rather than return to
New York, the 43-year-old poet stayed in the District, moving among the
dozens of hospitals that had been set up to care for the river of
wounded soldiers that flowed north.

With a haversack slung over his shoulder,
Whitman stopped at bedsides, sharing tobacco, crackers, peaches, the
day’s newspapers. . . . He wrote letters for wounded soldiers. He sat
with them as they died.

In 2006, D.C. Council member Jim Graham
and others were looking for a way to honor the caregivers who had
nursed the sick in the earliest days of the city’s HIV crisis. They
found inspiration in Whitman’s Civil War-era poem.

“That poem was
inspired by his ministrations to the sick and the dying, and so that,
of course, has a fitting connection to the early years of the AIDS
epidemic,” Graham told Answer Man. Dupont Circle, as the longtime center
of the gay community, the setting was perfect.

“It has the benefit of that particular station’s very long escalator,” Graham said. “As you go down, you have time to read.”

(Source)