A friend and follower of Walt Whitman’s, John Johnston loved the countryside for many reasons. In one sense he was an Adherer like Hallam and Cresswell: the landscape he loved most of all was that of his native Annan with its river, bridge and meadows. He was also an Explorer, whose careful observations of nature were prompted by a quest for spiritual more than scientific knowledge, and a Withdrawer, who repeatedly turned his back on dirty, smoky Bolton to find refuge in nature. Yet more than he was Adherer, Explorer or Withdrawer, Johnston was a Restorer. He went to the countryside to recompose something that was impaired and disordered by the constant turbulence to which his very active life exposed him. ‘Loafing’ quietly in secluded rural locations played a crucial role in sustaining the ethical and spiritual framework he drew on to endure professional difficulties and personal losses.

Restoring health to casualties of the Civil War functioned as a work of unprecedented national literary repair. Soldiers, caregivers, and civilians experienced wounding, illness, and convalescence as conditions that not only imperiled the physical body, but also symbolically disrupted the national body and psyche. Such disruptions were as visible in Whitman's poetic sites of caregiving communion as they were in the turbulence of Chesnutt's or Tourgée's Reconstruction stories, where Black heritage functioned alternately as contagion or reclamation. In fiction, poetry, and memoir, period writers explored the intimacies of caregiving, raising bedside and battlefield encounters to a trope whose racial and gendered valences limned the tragedies and absurdities of war-time loss. Describing a range of traumas from physical pain to the compromises of disability, they oversaw the emergence of the hospital narrative as a budding literary genre that, in coming to terms with the medical crisis of the war and its aftermath, established the genre that we prize today.