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Poe's Death Is Rewritten As Case of Rabies, Not Telltale Alcohol

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Poe's Death Is Rewritten As Case of Rabies, Not Telltale Alcohol That is a classic case of rabies, the doctor said. His study is Poe's Death Is Rewritten as Case of Rabies, Not Telltale in the September issue of The Maryland Medical Journal. Alcohol In the brief period when he was calm and awake, Poe Published: September 15, 1996 in the New York Times refused alcohol and could drink water only with great difficulty. Rabies victims frequently exhibit hydrophobia, or Edgar Allan Poe did not die drunk in a gutter in Baltimore fear of water, because it is painful to swallow. but rather had rabies, a new study suggests. There is no evidence that a rabid animal had bitten Poe. The researcher, Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist who About one-fourth of rabies victims reportedly cannot practices a block from Poe's grave, says it is true that the remember being bitten. After an infection, the symptoms writer was seen in a bar on Lombard Street in October can take up to a year to appear. But when the symptoms do 1849, delirious and possibly wearing somebody else's soiled appear, the disease is a swift and brutal killer. Most clothes. patients die in a few days. But Poe was not drunk, said Dr. Benitez, an assistant Poe ''had all the features of encephalitic rabies,'' said Dr. professor of medicine at the University of Maryland Henry Wilde, who frequently treats rabies at Chulalongkorn Medical Center. ''I think Poe is much maligned in that University Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand. respect,'' he added. Although it has been well established that Poe died in the The writer entered Washington College Hospital comatose, hospital, legend has it that he succumbed in the gutter, a Dr. Benitez said, but by the next day was perspiring heavily, victim of his debauched ways. hallucinating and shouting at imaginary companions. The next day, he seemed better but could not remember falling The legend may have been fostered by his doctor, who in ill. later years became a temperance advocate and changed the details to make an object lesson of Poe's death. On his fourth day at the hospital, Poe again grew confused and belligerent, then quieted down and died. The curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in scheduled to present his findings a few weeks later, he had Baltimore, Jeff Jerome, said that he had heard dozens of figured out the mystery. tales but that ''almost everyone who has come forth with a theory has offered no proof.'' ''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 Some versions have Poe unconscious under the steps of the myself, 'This doesn't look like it's from the 1990's.' Then it Baltimore Museum before being taken to the hospital. dawned on me that E. P. was Edgar Poe.'' 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. Plot Thickens! Poe almost surely did not die of alcohol poisoning or withdrawal, Mr. Jerome said. The writer was so sensitive to Written By Leon Neyfakh alcohol that a glass of wine would make him violently ill for days. Poe may have had problems with alcohol as a younger Published on 10/16/07 by the New York Observer man, Mr. Jerome said, but by the time he died at 40 he almost always avoided it. Last year, the writer Matthew Pearl published a novel called The Poe Shadow, in which a young lawyer sets out to solve Dr. Benitez worked on Poe's case as part of a clinical one of the great enduring mysteries of American literary pathologic conference. Doctors are presented with a history: What killed Edgar Allan Poe? Like his protagonist, hypothetical patient and a description of the symptoms and Mr. Pearl was fascinated by the question, which has vexed are asked to render a diagnosis. scholars ever since the great man died in 1849 at the age of 40, in a Baltimore hospital after being discovered, Dr. Benitez said that at first he did not know that he had distraught and incoherent, in a local tavern. been assigned Poe, because his patient was described only as ''E. P., a writer from Richmond.'' But by the time he was Mr. Pearl had wanted to write a novel exploring the newspaper articles that he’d come across, in the archives mystery. But he never expected to uncover actual evidence of the University of Virginia and Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt that could help solve it. Free Library, while conducting research for the book. When he went back and looked at them, the articles There are numerous competing theories about Mr. Poe’s confirmed that Mr. Poe’s body had been exhumed, 26 death—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, years after his death, so that his coffin could be moved to even has an exhibit dedicated to all of them. Some Poe a more prominent place at the front of the cemetery. experts believe it was the result of drink. Others think he had rabies. A few argue he was poisoned by corrupt political More to the point, a few of the articles suggested that the operatives. But Mr. Pearl—a 32-year-old graduate of Harvard great man’s brain had been visible to onlookers during the College and Yale Law School, whose 2003 debut, the procedure. international best seller The Dante Club, prompted Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown to declare him, “the new star of The first of these was an undated letter to the editor of The literary fiction”—told The Observer recently that he has Baltimore Gazette, which claimed that “a medical unearthed new information that suggests a less sensational gentleman” had seen “that the brain of the poet Poe, on answer: Mr. Poe, it seems, may have died of a brain tumor. the opening of his grave … was in an almost perfect state of preservation,” and that “the cerebral mass, as seen through The immediate circumstances of Mr. Poe’s death are not in the base of the skull, evidenced no signs of disintegration or dispute. He had been missing for several days when a man decay, though, of course, it is somewhat diminished in named Snodgrass found him on the night of Oct. 3, 1849, size.” barely conscious and wearing clothes that did not fit, and brought him to Washington College Hospital for treatment. The second was an 1878 article in the St. Louis Republican, “At the hospital he kind of ranted and raved,” Mr. Pearl noting that “the sexton who attended to the removal of the said. Three days later, he was dead. poet’s body” had lifted the head during the exhumation and reported seeing the brain “[rattling] around inside just But one night during the summer of 2006…(passage deleted like a lump of mud.” The sexton reportedly thought that by Mr. Kaeser)… Mr. Pearl remembered some old “the brain had dried and hardened in the skull.” “What I realized was, if that was the case, it would be the he’s excited to have found a concrete lead amid the tangle only physical evidence we have of what Poe’s condition was of unsubstantiated theories: “At least [the tumor theory] at his time of death,” Mr. Pearl said. has some evidence and some trails that you can follow that … It’s not just throwing the word ‘rabies’ out there and Intrigued, Mr. Pearl asked a coroner for an expert opinion. thinking, ‘That sounds good!’…I’d hope in this case “I read her the description,” Mr. Pearl said, “and she said, someone picks up the scent and finds more on this.” ‘Well, that person is just wrong. Unless you embalm the body, the brain is the first thing to liquefy. There’s no way it Still, he went on, the case will probably never be closed. would still be there 25 years later.’” “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 But a tumor, the coroner said, can calcify while the rest of the J.F.K. assassination.” 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 “Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus Wilmot Griswold” Hal Poe, a descendant of the writer who serves on the Published by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore Jan. board of the Poe Museum, and who told Pearl that he had 22, 2009 “stumbled onto something quite important.” Mr. Pearl then went to Poe scholar James Hutchisson, who had advanced Mr. Kaeser’s introduction: Wilmot Grisold was a writer and the tumor theory a year earlier in a Poe biography, based literary critic who lived at the same time as Poe. He was on other evidence, including the fact that Dr. Moran initially most well-known for publishing a very successful collection of reported the cause of death as “congestion of the brain.” poetry, The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). Poe and Despite the enthusiasm with which experts like Mr. Griswold knew each other. In fact, Griswold hired Poe to Hutchisson have greeted his findings, Mr. Pearl isn’t write a review of his collection.
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