Through the chilly wet streets Poe was driven to the hospital of Washington Medical College, set on the highest ground of Baltimore. An imposing five-story building with vaulted gothic windows, it afforded both public wards and private rooms, advertised as being spacious, well ventilated, and directed by an experienced medical staff. Admitted at five in the afternoon, Poe was given a private room, reportedly in a section reserved for cases involving drunkenness. He was attended by the resident physician, Dr. John J. Moran, who apparently had living quarters in the hospital together with his wife. Moran had received his medical degree from the University of Maryland four years earlier and was now only about twenty-six years old. But he knew the identity of his patient—a “great man,” he wrote of Poe, to whose “rarely gifted mind are we indebted for many of the brightest thoughts that adorn our literature.” He as well as the medical students, nurses, and other physicians—all considered Poe, he said, “an object of unusual regard.”
According to Moran and his wife, Poe reached the hospital in a stupor, unaware of who or what had brought him there. He remained thus “unconscious” until three o’clock the next morning, when he developed a tremor4 of the limbs and what Moran called “a busy, but not violent or active delirium.”5 His face was pale and he was drenched in sweat. He talked constantly, Moran said, addressing “spectral and imaginary objects on the walls.” Apparently during Poe’s delirium, his cousin Neilson Poe came to the hospital, having been contacted by Dr. Moran. A lawyer and journalist involved in Whig politics,6 Neilson was just Poe’s age. In happier circumstances Poe would not have welcomed the visit. Not only had Neilson offered Virginia7 and Muddy a home apart from him; his cousin also, he believed, envied his literary reputation. Years before he had remarked that he considered “the little dog,” as he called Neilson, the “bitterest enemy I have in the world.” The physicians anyway thought it inadvisable for Neilson to see Poe at the moment, when “very excitable.” Neilson sent some changes of linen and called again the next day, to find Poe’s condition improved.
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