Walt Whitman was working in Washington’s hospitals during the same period, an experience that would eventually inform the poems of *Drum-Taps*. Clara Barton was organizing supply distribution and laying the groundwork for what would eventually become her work at the front lines. These figures were part of a loose community of people who had come to Washington to serve in the medical and humanitarian response to the war and who found in the city’s improvised hospitals the defining experience of their generation.
Walker’s experience at the Patent Office Hospital was both formative and frustrating. She was doing physician’s work. She was not being recognized as a physician. The repeated requests by her supervisors to get her formally employed and paid were refused at the top of the medical bureaucracy — Secretary of War Stanton and Surgeon General Finley both said no. She worked without pay through the first year or more of the war.
The specific dynamics of this refusal are worth noting. Stanton and Finley were not refusing because Walker was unqualified. They were refusing because she was a woman, and the Army’s understanding of its own medical service did not include women physicians. The qualification question and the gender question were separate, but only the gender question was actually operative in their decisions.
## Fredericksburg and Chattanooga: The Middle Years
Between the Patent Office Hospital and the formal contract appointment in September 1863, Walker worked in a series of field hospital assignments that brought her progressively closer to the front.