The legend may have been fostered by his doctor, who in later
years became a temperance advocate5
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 forty he almost always avoided it.
Dr. Benitez worked on Poe’s case as part of a clinical pathologic conference. Doctors are presented with a hypothetical6 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 MRI’s,”7 the doctor said. “I started to say to myself, ‘This doesn’t look like it’s from the 1990s.’ Then it dawned on me that E. P. was Edgar Poe.”
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