The American Writer Found Delirious on a Baltimore Sidewalk in Someone Else's Clothes Who Died Four Days Later and Whose Cause of Death Is Still Disputed

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) left Richmond, Virginia, on 27 September 1849 on a steamer bound for Baltimore. He was, at 40, in fragile but functional health, recently engaged to be married to his Richmond childhood sweetheart Elmira Royster Shelton, and planning a trip north to collect editorial work and bring his mother-in-law south for the wedding.

He boarded the steamer at Rocketts Wharf, Richmond. He should have arrived in Baltimore on the morning of 28 September. He was found six days later on the afternoon of 3 October 1849 semi-conscious on the sidewalk outside Ryan’s Tavern on East Lombard Street — a polling place for that day’s Maryland congressional election. He was wearing thin cheap secondhand clothes that did not fit him. The clothes were not his.

He could not say where he had been for the missing six days. He was repeatedly delirious, calling out for someone named Reynolds. He never gave a coherent account of his movements between Richmond and Baltimore.

The hospital

Poe was taken by horse-drawn carriage to the Washington College Hospital, where the resident physician Dr John Joseph Moran received him at about 5 p.m. on 3 October. Moran’s reports — written several times over the subsequent thirty years, each version inconsistent with the others — describe Poe variously as quietly conversing, raving in delirium, vomiting, and groaning. Moran’s earliest 1849 letter (to Poe’s aunt Maria Clemm) is brief and clinical. His later reminiscences (1875, 1885) became progressively more melodramatic.

Poe died at approximately 5 a.m. on 7 October 1849. Moran’s death certificate, which has not survived, reportedly gave the cause as “phrenitis” — an obsolete 19th-century term for brain inflammation, used in the period for any unspecified febrile delirium.

The theories

Acute alcoholism. The conventional 19th-century explanation, promoted especially by Poe’s posthumous literary rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold who wrote a famously hostile obituary, was that Poe had drunk himself into a fatal binge over the six missing days. The objection is medical: Poe had a documented hypersensitivity to alcohol but had been on the wagon for several weeks before the trip, and clinical heavy alcohol consumption produces specific symptoms (jaundice, ascites, hepatic encephalopathy) that Moran did not describe.

Cooping. Poe was found on an election day, in cheap clothes that did not fit him, near a polling place. The 19th-century Baltimore election practice of cooping — kidnapping unconscious or vulnerable men, forcing them with alcohol or drugs into voting multiple times at successive polling stations dressed in different clothes — was endemic. The hypothesis is that Poe was cooped, repeatedly poisoned with rotgut spirit, and dumped at the last polling station. The objection is that there is no specific evidence beyond the suggestive clothing.

Rabies. Dr Michael Benitez of the University of Maryland argued in 1996 that Poe’s documented symptoms — confusion, refusal of water, hallucinations, intermittent lucidity, four-day course from admission to death — matched encephalitic rabies more closely than alcoholism. Rabies has an incubation period of weeks to months, which would explain Poe’s apparent good health before the trip. Poe had owned cats throughout his adult life; one could plausibly have been the vector.

Syphilis, brain tumour, mercury poisoning, carbon monoxide, heart failure. Each has been argued by one or another medical historian. None has been definitively established.

The evidence is permanently unresolvable. The Washington College Hospital records were destroyed in a fire; Moran’s clinical notes do not survive; Poe’s body was buried without an autopsy. He was reinterred in a more prominent Westminster Hall plot in 1875.

The Reynolds

The most-remembered detail of Poe’s last hours is the name he kept calling out: Reynolds. The identity has never been established. Candidates include the Antarctic explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds (whose 1830s polar narrative had inspired The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), a Baltimore carpenter named Henry Reynolds who served on the same polling-place election board as one of the men who found Poe, and an entirely imaginary figure produced by Poe’s delirium.

Whoever Reynolds was, he did not come to the hospital.