Your card of 31st just to hand.2 Very sorry to hear such bad accounts of the cold but trust it will soon be better, [/] wish you could have a good alcohol bath, real good sweat, would help you very much—can you not get some one in Camden to help you to arrange an alcohol bath—it is extremely simple. Willy Gurd3 still here, he goes East tomorrow morning, has the gas meter4 all constructed ("in his minds eye") already, will soon put it together when he gets alongside his lathe—all well here and nothing new. Ground still quite white with snow
Affectionately yours R M BuckeCorrespondent:
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).