While Whitman's belief in the healing power of touch was shared by some nurses, others with whom he worked seemed barely able to tolerate his presence in the wards. As Martin Murray has discussed, not everyone thought Whitman's nursing service during the war was meritorious:

Helen Wright, who served at Armory Square and Alexandria's Mansion House Hospital, was one of the poet's favorite nurses. Reflecting his belief in the power of magnetic attraction as a healing force, Whitman concluded that strong emotional and physical bonds between patient and nurse were essential for the success of any medical program. Wright embodied the qualities of Whitman's ideal nurse: "The presence of a good middle-aged or elderly woman, the magnetic touch of hands, the expressive features of the mother, the silent soothing of her presence, her words, her knowledge and privileges arrived at only through having had children, are precious and final qualifications."

Wright provided no testimonial concerning Whitman, but two of her fellow nurses at Armory Square did, and their animosity toward Whitman is quite startling. Harriet Foote Hawley, the wife of Brigadier General Joseph Roswell Hawley of Connecticut, positively fumed when Whitman approached. "There comes that odious Walt Whitman to talk evil and unbelief to my boys," she wrote in a letter to her husband. "I think I would rather see the evil one himself--at least if he had horns and hoofs--in my ward. I shall get him out as soon as possible."

Amanda Akin, of a prominent New York family, also resented Whitman. On one occasion, Lewy Brown asked Akin to read aloud in her ward a letter from a vacationing Whitman to the soldiers. . . . Akin obligingly read the letter, but later commented to her sister, "Read a very ludicrous and characteristic letter from Walt Whitman to his 'fellow comrades,' as he called the soldiers. As they failed to understand the jumbled sentences written on foolscap, they brought it to me. He was spending a vacation with his mother in Brooklyn, and his love for them was repeated in many incoherent sentences. I could only imagine it was written very late at night and he had taken 'a drop too much.'"