In the first chapter of Trall's "Home-Treatment for Sexual Abuses," he lists several of the "causes" of "sexual abuses," such as  "Obstructed Skin," "Improper Clothing"; "Sedentary Habits," and  "Self-Abuse in Schools."   One of the more intriguing of the causes, however, is "Obscene Books and Conversations."  As you are reading the following passage from that section, reflect on why Whitman might have chosen poetry as the medium for expressing his own views on sexuality.   Does poetry fit into what Trall calls "novels and fictitious writing"?   It is worth noting as well that Fowler and Wells, the publisher of Trall's text, was also the publisher of the first editions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

Obscene novels and fictitious writings, specially addressed to the amative propensity, full of lewd images, impure conceptions, and lust-engendering narratives, and only interesting or amusing on such accounts, are abundant in our literary markets.  And, I am pained to be obliged to add, some of our most 'respectable' and wealthy publishing houses do their full share in scattering broadcast over the land vile and corrupting 'light literature,' in the shape of trashy romances, exciting seduction stories, narratives of dissolute characters, and fictitious histories of imaginary debauchees, whose deeds of sensuality and depravity are detailed with all the minuteness and circumstantiality that can arrest the attention and inflame the passion of the youthful and susceptible mind.  And this kind of mental food, like improper aliment for the stomach, is pernicious in proportion to the youthfulness of the person who partakes of and appropriates it.
     Young persons ought especially to be confined to books whose subjects are the practical arts and sciences, histories of nations, biographies of good and virtuous persons, etc., and such fictions only as are directed to the intellect and higher sentiments; leaving the details of heroes and heroins, whose greatest achievements were in the line of gluttony, and revelry, and profligacy, and debauchery, to the period of life when the judgment is mature, and when imagination and passion have come under the dominion of intellect, if, indeed, such works must be read at all.