By Tessa Nolan
In September 1858, a 13-part essay series began appearing in the pages of the New York Atlas, a Sunday broadsheet. It ran under the byline “Mose Velsor, of Brooklyn” – a pen name well known to readers of mid-century New York journalism. The series, titled Manly Health and Training, With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions, ran to nearly 47,000 words across its full run and covered everything from cold-water bathing and beef consumption to facial hair, footwear, and sexual restraint.
For over 150 years, no one connected it to its real author. Then, in 2016, a University of Houston doctoral student named Zachary Turpin published evidence – manuscript drafts, a matching advertisement, and the “Mose Velsor” pseudonym Whitman had used repeatedly since 1848 – proving that the series was written by Walt Whitman himself. The man who gave America Leaves of Grass had also produced one of the most striking proto-wellness manifestos in the English language.
The Lost Manuscript and Its Rediscovery
The New York Atlas was a well-circulated weekly at the time of publication, known for its literary features and advocacy for workers’ rights. Whitman knew its proprietors, Anson Herrick and John F. Ropes, through their co-ownership of another paper, the New York Aurora, for which Whitman had briefly served as editor. Herrick famously called Whitman “the laziest fellow who ever undertook to edit a city paper” – a评价 Whitman returned by publicly calling Herrick and Ropes “two as dirty fellows, as ever were able by the force of brass, ignorance of their own ignorance, and a coarse manner of familiarity, to push themselves among gentlemen.”
That Whitman published Manly Health under a pseudonym makes sense given the politics of the era. At the time of the series, Whitman was working as an editor for the Brooklyn Daily Times, a Republican paper politically at odds with the Democratic-leaning Atlas. Herrick also despised Leaves of Grass, calling it “dirty” – hardly the sort of man who would willingly publish his former rival’s extended meditation on men’s bodies and virility.
Turpin’s discovery was formally documented in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (Volume 33, Number 3, 2016), with a critical introduction he co-authored with Zachary Turpin. The full text was subsequently made available through the Walt Whitman Archive, the digital humanities project based at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2017, Ten Speed Press published a curated edition, Walt Whitman’s Guide to Manly Health and Training, illustrated by Matthew Allen – a 123-page collection of over 75 extracted quotes and passages.
The Whitman Wellness Programme
Reading Manly Health in 2026 is uncanny. Whitman, writing under the Velsor pseudonym, prescribes daily cold-water immersion as a cornerstone of male vitality: “The tonic and sanitary effects of cold water are too precious to be foregone in some of their forms.” He advocates consuming a diet of rare-cooked beef, insists on outdoor exercise over gymnasiums (“Places of training, and all for gymnastic exercises, should be in the open air – upon the turf or sand is best”), and recommends dancing as a means of developing “the flexibility and strength of the hips, knees, muscles of the calf, ankles, and feet.”
He also urges men to avoid doctors whenever possible: “The benefit of medicine, or medical advice is very much overrated. Nature’s medicines are simple food, nursing, air, rest, cheerful encouragement, and the like.” This was not mere iconoclasm. In an era when bloodletting persisted well into the 1860s and medical training was rudimentary, Whitman’s suspicion of the profession had a rational basis – even if his alternative prescriptions were often more instinct than science.
The parallels with the modern wellness industry are startling. The cold-water bathing Whitman championed is now one of three pillars of the Wim Hof Method, a wellness programme whose celebrity advocates include Chris Hemsworth and Tom Cruise. His advocacy for rare beef anticipates the carnivore diet promoted by figures such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. His emphasis on self-denial and sexual restraint echoes through the NoFap and semen-retention movements. The 19th-century poet was, in effect, writing a lifestyle substack before the format existed.
The Body Electric – and the Broken Body
The irony of Whitman’s wellness manifesto is that the man who celebrated bodily perfection spent much of his own life in physical decline. Throughout Leaves of Grass, first self-published on 4 July 1855 and endlessly revised until his death in 1892, Whitman championed the human form as divine: “I Sing the Body Electric” catalogues muscles, senses, and genitalia with an enthusiasm that scandalised contemporary readers and led to the book being banned in Boston.
But the reality diverged sharply from the rhetoric. The Walt Whitman Archive documents the trajectory: his first signs of serious illness emerged during the American Civil War, when he made over 600 visits to Washington, D.C. hospitals, supporting an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 wounded soldiers. The National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian describes how he “spent hours listening to their stories, writing letters home to family members, scribbling down their needs in small notebooks he carried with him, and bringing them gifts such as fresh oranges and licorice candy.” He considered those years “the greatest privilege and satisfaction . . . and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life.”
The work cost him. Sore throats, unexpected weight gain, dizziness, and hypertension followed. In June 1864, he returned to Brooklyn housebound for a full month. His health dipped again in the late 1860s with depression, headaches, and sudden sweats doctors attributed to “hospital malaria” absorbed during the war. On 23 January 1873, he suffered his first major stroke, which left him partially paralysed. A second stroke in 1888 rendered him a semi-invalid for the remainder of his life.
The scholar Thomas Sanfilip, writing in the Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, notes the tension explicitly: “There is a distinct contrast between Whitman’s idealized notions of the human body as expressed in his literary work and the actual state of his health as it evolved over the course of his life.” Yet even in decline, Whitman maintained his faith in nature’s healing power – a conviction rooted in his engagement with hydropathy, phrenology, and other alternative medical movements popular in Victorian America. He had visited the offices of the phrenologists Fowler and Wells at 131 Nassau Street as early as 1849, and it was Fowler and Wells who distributed the first edition of Leaves of Grass and published the first review of the book.
Masculinity, Nationalism, and the Problematic Prescription
Read closely, Manly Health is not simply a fitness guide. Its stated aim is to perfect the “physique of America” by helping to create “an entire nation of fighting men.” Individual male health is, in Whitman’s formulation, coequal to national health. Getting fit becomes a patriotic duty. The historian and author Ralf Webb, writing in The Guardian in July 2024, drew explicit parallels between Whitman’s twinning of masculinity and nationalism and contemporary figures such as Alex Jones, the far-right commentator whose Infowars empire sells testosterone supplements alongside conspiracy theories about “globalists” feminising the population.
Webb also identified the essay series’ affinity with manosphere discourse: Whitman’s veneration of the “colossal” ancient Greek athletes, his contempt for “puny and dandy tribes of literary men,” and his recommendation of chastity and “self-denial” to preserve male vitality all prefigure the alpha-male/beta-cuck hierarchy that structures contemporary masculinist ideology.
Yet Whitman’s own poetry contains a corrective. As Webb noted, the same body of work that produced Manly Health also produced the “Calamus” poems – an extended celebration of intimacy, tenderness, and physical affection between men. “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself,” Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself.” “I am large, I contain multitudes.” The poet who prescribed rare steak and cold plunges also imagined a society held together by affection between men – a vision that sits uneasily alongside the steroidal nationalism of Manly Health.
A Timeless Text for an Age of Influencers
The rediscovery of Manly Health and Training matters because it reveals something persistent about American (and by extension Western) culture: the impulse to wrap male vanity in the language of national purpose, and the recurring fantasy that ancient bodies hold the secret to modern vitality. Whitman wrote in 1858; Wim Hof and the carnivore-diet evangelists sell the same dream in 2026. The anxieties are identical – that modern life softens men, that disconnection from nature erodes strength, that discipline and cold water can restore what civilisation has taken away.
What Whitman’s text also reveals, however, is the cost of such thinking. The man who told Americans to guard “your manly power, your health and strength, from all hurts and violations” spent his final years paralysed and dependent on a full-time caregiver, the nurse Harry Stafford, in Camden, New Jersey. He died on 26 March 1892. The body he celebrated in verse – “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from” – had long since betrayed his prescriptions.
Perhaps that is the most honest lesson Manly Health offers. Not the cold plunges, not the rare beef, not the sexual restraint – but the gap between the body we imagine and the body we inhabit. Whitman understood that gap better than most. He simply chose to keep singing.
