1890. Dr. John Johnston, Bolton, England. Saunders #108. Courtesy
Charles E. Feinberg. Taken on Camden wharf. With
Warren Fritzinger, Whitman's last and favorite nurse. "Warry,"
Whitman
said, "is faithful, true, and loyal." Whitman called him his
"sailor boy," and he indeed had spent years at sea. He was the
son of a friend of Mary Davis, Whitman's housekeeper; when Warry's
parents died, Mary became his guardian, and she talked him into
becoming Whitman's nurse. He was a comfort to Whitman in the last
years:
"I like to look at him--he is health to look at: young, strong,
lithe." Dr. J. Johnston, one of Whitman's English admirers and a
founder of the "Eagle Street College," arrived in Philadelphia
to visit Whitman on 15 July 1890, and that evening photographed
Whitman
and Fritzinger, who were out for a walk, Fritzinger pushing Whitman
in his wheel chair (which had replaced his phaeton as a mode of
transportation in 1889): "As we approached the wharf he
exclaimed: 'How delicious the air is!' On the wharf he allowed
me to photograph himself and Warry (it was almost dusk and the
light unfavourable), after which I sat down on a log of wood
beside him, and he talked in the most free and friendly manner
for a full hour, facing the golden sunset, in the cool evening
breeze, with the summer lightning playing around us, and the
ferry-boats crossing and re-crossing the Delaware."
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