Search >> Roosa, Daniel Bennett St. John (1838-)

Physician.

A graduate of the University of New York Medical School, Dr. Daniel Bennett St. John Roosa worked at Broadway Hospital in New York City, the same hospital Walt Whitman occasionally visited to comfort the sick and wounded among his working-class friends during the 1850s and early 1860s. Roosa recalls that "[n]o one could see him [Whitman] sitting by the bedside of a suffering stage driver without soon learning that he had a sincere and profound sympathy for this order of men" (Roosa 30). Whitman dined with him at Pfaff’s on at least one occasion, but Roosa was apparently unaware either that Pfaff’s was a Bohemian gathering place or that Whitman was a Bohemian poet (Allen 267-69).

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References & Biographical Resources

Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: MacMillan, 1955. [more about this work]

He was one of Whitman's friends from the time when the poet visited the sick at New York Hospital during the 1850s. Roosa visited Pfaff's once but was unaware that it was Bohemian hang-out or that Whitman was even a writer. The time of day that Roosa and other doctors visited Pfaff's was not popular among the writers, so the group of doctors never met the Saturday Press crowd. Roosa was most likely unaware that Whitman was associated with Clapp or the other members of that circle. Roosa's impression of Whitman was that he "had no intimate acquaintance with the literary New Yorkers of that time" and he "was not generally considered a literary man" in 1860. Allen argues that while Roosa was underinformed, the general impression he gives of Whitman is correct (267-269). [pages: 267-69,290]

Donaldson, Thomas. Walt Whitman the Man. New York; F.P. Harper, 1896. 276 p. [more about this work]

[pages: 206]

Roosa, Dr. Daniel Bennett St. John. "Untitled Article in Richard Henry Stoddard's "World of Letters"." New York Mail and Express. 20 Jun. 1898: 30. [more about this work]

Whitman dined with Roosa at Pfaff's on at least one occasion (30). [pages: 30]

Wilson, James Grant and John Fiske, eds. Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume V, Pickering-Sumter. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1888. [more about this work]

[pages: 317]