SAUNDERS, Henry S.
Henry Scholey Saunders (1864-1951), from our very own London, Ontario, was a Toronto cellist, collector, bibliographer, and Walt Whitman enthusiast. A self-taught bookbinder, painter and typesetter, Saunders used these skills to produce his own limited-quanitity books of Whitman's poems. These he gave to friends, such as the Margaret M. Calder mentioned on the front endpaper, and kept for his own Whitman collection. He ultimately sold his collection to Brown University in 1932. Note the postcard Saunders address to Dr. Beemer at the Mimico Hospital for the Insane. Dr. Nelson Henry Beemer was the first superintendent of what was originally known as the Mimico Lunatic Asylum, which Mimico Hospital for the Insane in 1911, the Ontario Hospital, New Toronto in 1919, and finally the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital before in closed in 1979. Beemer, superintendent there from 1894 until his retirement in 1928, was a strong believer in meaningful work as a form of rehabilitation therapy, just like Walt Whitman's friend Richard Maurice Bucke, superintendent of London's asylum.
