Born to a working class family, Walt Whitman had to quit formal schooling at the age of 11 and start working as office boy for some prominent lawyers. Walt began self-educating, gaining wide knowledge through visits to museums, nonstop reading, as well as engaging in conversations and debates. He learned a lot about literature, theatre, history, geography, music and archaeology through his informal education. He was not only a famous American poet, teacher and journalist, but also a volunteer nurse during the civil war.

Teaching made him depressed, and his poetic works bore this feeling of him. This dragged him back to teaching in the Southold, which he abruptly abandoned for fiction writing, real journalism, and poetry. It seems, though, that his return to Southold and creating unperturbed journalistic pieces suggested that he considered himself temperamentally unsuited for teaching.

It was the Civil War that brought Walt Whitman from being a journalist, teacher and poet into the nursing profession. First, for the purpose of making the wounded patients subjects for his journalistic pieces, Walt's hospital visits turned into genuine concern for this people; perhaps because several of his brothers have enlisted in the Union Army as well, and that his been doing it to visit injured friends for years before the Civil War, informally and personally nursing them. But as the war advanced and thousands of wounded soldiers needed care in Washington, D.C., Whitman assumed the responsibility of a nurse. He even assisted physicians during surgery.

That experience was just the tip of an even greater work of tending to wounded soldiers, when he journeyed to look for his brother George Washington Whitman, who also enlisted in the army. The horrific sight of wounded, amputated, and dead soldiers haunted him eternally. Moved by the condition of the disabled soldiers, Whitman voluntarily made himself their legs and arms for the next few years. He continued to nurse soldiers in Washington and Virginia battlefront on February 1864. And in March 26, 1892, Walt Whitman passed away due to tuberculosis.