Up!: Manhood, Democratic Medicine, and Walt Whitman's Secret Health Writings

In 1858, Walt Whitman covertly published in serial form "Manly Health and Training," a book-length manifesto on diet, exercise, and the future of American health. Appearing at a critical juncture in US history, this newly rediscovered work encapsulates many of the great debates that helped define the health sciences, then and now. It also offers a rare glimpse into a "lost" year in the life of Walt Whitman. Scholar Zachary Turpin will explore his recovery of the series, and its place in the life's work of the Good Gray Poet.

After his lecture, Turpin will discuss the series and its implications with Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of The New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, followed by Q&A with the audience.

Zachary Turpin is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Houston. His research interests include nineteenth-century periodical culture, digital-archival research, textual recovery, and the history of American philosophy. Besides publishing studies of the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, he has recovered lost or neglected works by Walt Whitman, Emma Lazarus, Rebecca Harding Davis, and L. Frank Baum. His scholarship appears, or is forthcoming, in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, ESQ, Leviathan, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, J19, and American Literary Realism.

Isaac Gewirtz has served as Curator of the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature since September 2000. He is the author of “I am With You”: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 1855-2005. He curated the NYPL exhibition of the same title, as well as the exhibitions Victorians, Moderns, and Beats, New in the Berg Collection 1994-2001; Passion’s Discipline: A History of the Sonnet in the British Isles and America (2003); and Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac On the Road, 1957-2007 (2007). Dr. Gewirtz received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Columbia University.