Whitman called this engraving, which he used as the frontispiece for the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, "characteristic," and noted that "I was in full bloom then: weighed two hundred and ten pounds . . . in those years I was in the best health: not a thing was amiss" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Tuesday, March 19, 1889). Ted Genoways has argued that the engraving has a complex genealogy, since it is based on Charles Hine’s oil portrait of Whitman, which in turn was based on Thomas Faris’s 1859 daguerreotype of Whitman. (See Ted Genoways, "'Scented herbage of my breast': Whitman's Chest Hair and the Frontispiece to the 1860 Edition of Leaves of Grass," Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 4, 2010, pp. 693–702.)

For more on Whitman's physical health and dietary habits during this time, see Daniel Mark Epstein, Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington (New York: Ballantine, 2004), p. 51.