Elizabeth Leavitt Keller

Born in Buffalo, New York, on November 3, 1839, Elizabeth Leavitt Keller later trained at the Women's Hospital in Philadelphia. She married William Keller in 1858 and was widowed seven years later.

Keller is most closely associated with Walt Whitman. The Whitman Archive describes her as a professional nurse who was employed to care for Whitman during the last months of his life, alongside his personal nurse, Warren Fritzinger.

Her best-known book, Walt Whitman in Mickle Street (1921), grew out of that experience. The book is often noted not just as a memoir of Whitman’s final period in Camden, but also as a defense of his housekeeper, Mary O. Davis, whose claim against Whitman’s estate Keller supported.