Poe's Death Is Rewritten as Case of Rabies, Not Telltale
Alcohol
Published: September 15, 1996 in the New York Times
Edgar Allan Poe did not die drunk in a gutter in Baltimore
but rather had rabies, a new study suggests.
That is a classic case of rabies, the doctor said. His study is
in the September issue of The Maryland Medical Journal.
In the brief period when he was calm and awake, Poe
refused alcohol and could drink water only with great
difficulty. Rabies victims frequently exhibit hydrophobia, or
fear of water, because it is painful to swallow.
The researcher, Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist who
practices a block from Poe's grave, says it is true that the
writer was seen in a bar on Lombard Street in October
1849, delirious and possibly wearing somebody else's soiled
clothes.
There is no evidence that a rabid animal had bitten Poe.
About one-fourth of rabies victims reportedly cannot
remember being bitten. After an infection, the symptoms
can take up to a year to appear. But when the symptoms do
appear, the disease is a swift and brutal killer. Most
patients die in a few days.
But Poe was not drunk, said Dr. Benitez, an assistant
professor of medicine at the University of Maryland
Medical Center. ''I think Poe is much maligned in that
respect,'' he added.
Poe ''had all the features of encephalitic rabies,'' said Dr.
Henry Wilde, who frequently treats rabies at Chulalongkorn
University Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand.
The writer entered Washington College Hospital comatose,
Dr. Benitez said, but by the next day was perspiring heavily,
hallucinating and shouting at imaginary companions. The
next day, he seemed better but could not remember falling
ill.
On his fourth day at the hospital, Poe again grew confused
and belligerent, then quieted down and died.
Although it has been well established that Poe died in the
hospital, legend has it that he succumbed in the gutter, a
victim of his debauched ways.
The legend may have been fostered by his doctor, who in
later years became a temperance advocate and changed
the details to make an object lesson of Poe's death.
The curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in
Baltimore, Jeff Jerome, said that he had heard dozens of
tales but that ''almost everyone who has come forth with a
theory has offered no proof.''
Some versions have Poe unconscious under the steps of the
Baltimore Museum before being taken to the hospital.
Other accounts place him on planks between two barrels
outside a tavern on Lombard Street. In most versions, Poe is
wearing someone else's clothes, having been robbed of his
suit.
Poe almost surely did not die of alcohol poisoning or
withdrawal, Mr. Jerome said. The writer was so sensitive to
alcohol that a glass of wine would make him violently ill for
days. Poe may have had problems with alcohol as a younger
man, Mr. Jerome said, but by the time he died at 40 he
almost always avoided it.
Dr. Benitez worked on Poe's case as part of a clinical
pathologic conference. Doctors are presented with a
hypothetical patient and a description of the symptoms and
are asked to render a diagnosis.
Dr. Benitez said that at first he did not know that he had
been assigned Poe, because his patient was described only
as ''E. P., a writer from Richmond.'' But by the time he was
scheduled to present his findings a few weeks later, he had
figured out the mystery.
''There was a conspicuous lack in this report of things like
CT scans and M.R.I.'s,'' the doctor said. ''I started to say to
myself, 'This doesn't look like it's from the 1990's.' Then it
dawned on me that E. P. was Edgar Poe.''
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Plot Thickens!
Written By Leon Neyfakh
Published on 10/16/07 by the New York Observer
Last year, the writer Matthew Pearl published a novel called
The Poe Shadow, in which a young lawyer sets out to solve
one of the great enduring mysteries of American literary
history: What killed Edgar Allan Poe? Like his protagonist,
Mr. Pearl was fascinated by the question, which has vexed
scholars ever since the great man died in 1849 at the age of
40, in a Baltimore hospital after being discovered,
distraught and incoherent, in a local tavern.
Mr. Pearl had wanted to write a novel exploring the
mystery. But he never expected to uncover actual evidence
that could help solve it.
There are numerous competing theories about Mr. Poe’s
death—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia,
even has an exhibit dedicated to all of them. Some Poe
experts believe it was the result of drink. Others think he had
rabies. A few argue he was poisoned by corrupt political
operatives. But Mr. Pearl—a 32-year-old graduate of Harvard
College and Yale Law School, whose 2003 debut, the
international best seller The Dante Club, prompted Da Vinci
Code author Dan Brown to declare him, “the new star of
literary fiction”—told The Observer recently that he has
unearthed new information that suggests a less sensational
answer: Mr. Poe, it seems, may have died of a brain tumor.
The immediate circumstances of Mr. Poe’s death are not in
dispute. He had been missing for several days when a man
named Snodgrass found him on the night of Oct. 3, 1849,
barely conscious and wearing clothes that did not fit, and
brought him to Washington College Hospital for treatment.
“At the hospital he kind of ranted and raved,” Mr. Pearl
said. Three days later, he was dead.
But one night during the summer of 2006…(passage deleted
by Mr. Kaeser)… Mr. Pearl remembered some old
newspaper articles that he’d come across, in the archives
of the University of Virginia and Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt
Free Library, while conducting research for the book.
When he went back and looked at them, the articles
confirmed that Mr. Poe’s body had been exhumed, 26
years after his death, so that his coffin could be moved to
a more prominent place at the front of the cemetery.
More to the point, a few of the articles suggested that the
great man’s brain had been visible to onlookers during the
procedure.
The first of these was an undated letter to the editor of The
Baltimore Gazette, which claimed that “a medical
gentleman” had seen “that the brain of the poet Poe, on
the opening of his grave … was in an almost perfect state of
preservation,” and that “the cerebral mass, as seen through
the base of the skull, evidenced no signs of disintegration or
decay, though, of course, it is somewhat diminished in
size.”
The second was an 1878 article in the St. Louis Republican,
noting that “the sexton who attended to the removal of the
poet’s body” had lifted the head during the exhumation
and reported seeing the brain “[rattling] around inside just
like a lump of mud.” The sexton reportedly thought that
“the brain had dried and hardened in the skull.”
“What I realized was, if that was the case, it would be the
only physical evidence we have of what Poe’s condition was
at his time of death,” Mr. Pearl said.
Intrigued, Mr. Pearl asked a coroner for an expert opinion.
“I read her the description,” Mr. Pearl said, “and she said,
‘Well, that person is just wrong. Unless you embalm the
body, the brain is the first thing to liquefy. There’s no way it
would still be there 25 years later.’”
But a tumor, the coroner said, can calcify while the rest of
the body decomposes. Perhaps that’s what the witnesses
were describing, she suggested. Sure enough, when Mr.
Pearl looked up photographs of brain tumors, he saw that
some of them really did look like shrunken brains.
Next, Mr. Pearl ran his theory by some experts. One was
Hal Poe, a descendant of the writer who serves on the
board of the Poe Museum, and who told Pearl that he had
“stumbled onto something quite important.” Mr. Pearl then
went to Poe scholar James Hutchisson, who had advanced
the tumor theory a year earlier in a Poe biography, based
on other evidence, including the fact that Dr. Moran initially
reported the cause of death as “congestion of the brain.”
Despite the enthusiasm with which experts like Mr.
Hutchisson have greeted his findings, Mr. Pearl isn’t
claiming to have solved the mystery once and for all. But
he’s excited to have found a concrete lead amid the tangle
of unsubstantiated theories: “At least [the tumor theory]
has some evidence and some trails that you can follow that
… It’s not just throwing the word ‘rabies’ out there and
thinking, ‘That sounds good!’…I’d hope in this case
someone picks up the scent and finds more on this.”
Still, he went on, the case will probably never be closed.
“Poe’s death is one of the biggest literary mysteries, period,”
Mr. Pearl said. “People don’t grow tired of it. It’s sort of like
the J.F.K. assassination.”
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“Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus Wilmot Griswold”
Published by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore Jan.
22, 2009
Mr. Kaeser’s introduction: Wilmot Grisold was a writer and
literary critic who lived at the same time as Poe. He was
most well-known for publishing a very successful collection of
poetry, The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). Poe and
Griswold knew each other. In fact, Griswold hired Poe to
write a review of his collection. Poe’s review was not as
glowing as Griswold had hoped and that may have been the
beginning of Griswold’s animosity towards Poe.
…Whatever the cause of Griswold’s animus (animosity/ill
will), the long years of resentment finally revealed
themselves in words of bitterness perhaps unique in the
history of obituaries: “Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in
Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement
will startle many, but few will be grieved by it“ (New York
Tribune, October 9, 1849, p. 2). Afraid of retaliation,
Griswold signed this article “Ludwig,” but his dislike of Poe
was well known and he was quickly exposed. Griswold
admitted to Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, in a letter of
December 17, 1849, “I wrote, as you suppose, the notice of
Poe in The Tribune, but very hastily. I was not his friend, nor
was he mine“ (Reprinted in Gill, The Life of Poe, 1877, pp.
228-229). The “Ludwig” obituary was widely reprinted.
Griswold, having now assumed the mantle of a true villain,
then began his most ingenious plot. Through some lessthan ethical arrangements with Maria Clemm, Poe’s
mother-in-law, he secured the rights to publish a
posthumous (after the death of) collection of Poe’s works.
(Technically, the rights to Poe’s estate belonged to his sister
Rosalie. Mrs. Clemm, unaware of his deep hostility towards
Edgar, may have first approached Griswold.) ...Initially, the
volumes contained only Poe’s writings, reprinting brief and
somewhat modified notices by James Russell Lowell and N.
P. Willis, but Griswold was not done yet.
In October of 1850, Griswold published an enlarged and
even more vituperative (insulting) account of Poe’s life in
the International Monthly Magazine… In this “Memoir”
Griswold cleverly manipulated and invented details of Poe’s
life for the least favorable account he could create. He even
forged letters from Poe to exaggerate his own role as Poe’s
benefactor and to alienate Poe’s friends. (A. H. Quinn
provides an exacting account of these forgeries in his 1941
biography of Poe.) No lie was too great for Griswold, no
slander too outrageous. Poe’s choice not to return to the
University of Virginia became expulsion for wild and
reckless behavior. Poe’s honorable discharge from the army
became desertion. The 1827 publication of Tamerlane and
Other Poems was dismissed as a lie. He even accused Poe of
engaging in some dark secret with the second Mrs. Allan
and invented a scheme by which Poe supposedly
blackmailed an unidentified “literary woman of South
Carolina” (presumably Mrs. Ellet). By praising Poe’s writings
and attacking Poe’s character, Griswold managed to make
himself appear to be a sincere admirer and to attain a false
sense of fairness in his general approach to Poe. In short, it
was a brilliant piece of character assassination. Poe’s
literary executor had become his literary executioner. Once
again, Poe’s friends came to his defense, but Griswold had
done his work well. For every magazine that carried a
condemnation of Griswold’s infamy, three repeated his
titillating (exciting) slanders as fact.