At Belle Isle, ninety percent of the prisoners weighed less than one hundred pounds. Walt Whitman asked "Can those be men?" after seeing the prisoners at Belle Isle. The following is a quote from him after returning home:
Those little livid brown, ash streaked, monkey-looking dwarfs?-are they not really mummified, dwindled corpses? They lay there, most of them, quite still, but with a horrible look in their eyes and skinny lips (often with not enough flesh to cover their teeth)...The dead there are not to be pitied as much as some of the living that have come from there-if they can be called living-many of them are mentally imbecile, and will never recuperate.
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