Your welcome card of 22d to hand this morning.1 By same mail a letter from W.J. Gurd2—he is getting on well with the gas meter and writes in excellent spirits.
All goes well with us here, we are having at the present moment a splendid rain
which will do a lot of good. The trees are coming into leaf rapidly and in a few
more days at the present rate the country will be green. I have the Tribune you sent
me con'g an acct. of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Walt, if I were in your fix I would
think seriously of going there for the next six months or a year (or even longer, but
that would depend) as a private patient. They might do you good (they will have the
best skill going) and if they did not you would be more comfortable there than
anywhere else perhaps in the world. If you would loc_es.00578.jpg think well of this I would go to Baltimore—make all the arrangements and then
take you from Camden to the Hospital. There is no palace in Europe so comfortable
for a sick or half sick man as this hospital would be. Think this over seriously (it
is worth it) Show this letter to Horace3 and talk it over with
him (but H. does not half realize as I do the boon such a chance would be to you)
P.S. I enclose the cutting that you may look over it again if you feel to. The more I think of it the more I think you decidedly ought to go—
RMB.N.B. I do not suppose the expence would be much more than the present subsidy but if it is we can easily get more money
RMB.Correspondent:
Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) was a
Canadian physician and psychiatrist who grew close to Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass in 1867 (and later memorizing it) and
meeting the poet in Camden a decade later. Even before meeting Whitman, Bucke
claimed in 1872 that a reading of Leaves of Grass led him
to experience "cosmic consciousness" and an overwhelming sense of epiphany.
Bucke became the poet's first biographer with Walt
Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883), and he later served as one
of his medical advisors and literary executors. For more on the relationship of
Bucke and Whitman, see Howard Nelson, "Bucke, Richard Maurice," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).