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[In Dr. Sanger's recent valuable]

About This Item

  • Title: [In Dr. Sanger's recent valuable]
  • Date: 9 December 1858
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.01369
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 9 December 1858: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Kaylen Michaelis Samantha Gilmore Kevin McMullen Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "[In Dr. Sanger's recent valuable]." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 17 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.01369.xml (TEI)
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☞In Dr. Sanger's recent valuable work on Prostitution,1 it is stated that the author applied, on the part of the Ten Governors, to the authorities of all the leading cities in the Union, for statistics of the great vice of the age—the vice most general, most costly, and most ruinous to health and morals, of all vices. Several of the Mayors of cities replied, and their statistics, in connexion with those of Dr. Sanger relative to New York, while they cannot possibly minister to prurient curiosity, enable the philanthropist and social reformer to gauge, in a measure, the vast depths of that horrid abyss of depravity and disease—all the more awful because the pseudo modesty of this hypocritical age shrouds it with darkness, and refuses to look at it. Among those cities that made no response to Dr. Sanger's inquiries, was Brooklyn. Why was this? Has the City of Churches so dark a side to its fashionably religious exterior that the Mayor and Police Superintendent dared not draw back the curtain and expose the hideous sight to the public gaze? We have no morbid love for looking on the horrible, but, as the physician cannot prescribe for a disease which he sees not the symptoms and extent of, so neither can there be any reformatory movement made in this city, while the extent of the damning plague-spot is sedulously concealed from view by our public authorities.2

Notes:

1. William W. Sanger (1819–1872) was a New York physician and practitioner of medicine, becoming the first Resident Physician at Blackwell’s Island. He also wrote the History of Prostitution(Boston: Harper's, 1858), which appeared serialized in the New York Atlas alongside Whitman's "Manly Health and Training." See also Whitman's editorial on Sanger's History written for the Brooklyn Daily Times, December 9, 1858. [back]

2.  [back]

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