The Death of Edgar Allan Poe (1849): Reynolds, Ryan's Tavern, and the Lost Medical Record.

What happened to Poe, in a paragraph.

On September 27, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe boarded a steamboat in Richmond, Virginia, bound for Baltimore, en route from there to Philadelphia (on a paid editing commission for the poet Marguerite St. Leon Loud) and then to New York to collect his aunt and prospective mother-in-law Maria Clemm and bring her to Richmond, where he was to be remarried to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton. The journey from Richmond to Baltimore took approximately twenty-four hours; he was last seen on the steamboat to a documented witness on the morning of September 28. He was scheduled to arrive in Baltimore on the afternoon of September 28, take a train to Philadelphia, and be in Philadelphia by September 29 or 30. He did not appear in Philadelphia. On the afternoon of Wednesday, October 3, 1849 — an election day on which Maryland was holding a Whig-Democratic contest for the U.S. House of Representatives and several local offices — the printer Joseph W. Walker found Poe in or near the gutter outside Ryan's Fourth Ward Polls, a tavern at the corner of Lombard and High Streets in Baltimore, which had been pressed into service as the Fourth Ward polling place. Poe was semi-conscious, unable to walk unaided, dressed in clothes that did not appear to belong to him (a thin, cheap, soiled shirt, ragged trousers, dirty old shoes, no waistcoat, no overcoat, a soiled palm-leaf hat — entirely unlike Poe's customary careful appearance), and able to give Walker only the name of one of his Baltimore acquaintances, Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass. Walker sent a hand-delivered note to Snodgrass. Snodgrass arrived; with Henry Herring (Poe's uncle by marriage) he had Poe carried in a hack to Washington Medical College, where Poe was admitted at about 5 p.m. and remained in the care of the resident physician Dr. John Joseph Moran. Poe never regained the lucidity that would permit him to give a coherent account of his previous five days. Over the following four days he was alternately stuporous and violently delirious. He spoke to imagined figures on the walls of his room. In the hours before his death, he repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds." At about 3 a.m. on Sunday, October 7, he became calm, said the words (variously reported) "Lord help my poor soul," and at about 5 a.m. he died. No autopsy was performed. The cause of death given in the contemporary press (the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Clipper, and the Public Ledger) was "congestion of the brain," "inflammation of the brain," or "cerebral inflammation" — in the medical vocabulary of 1849, these were not specific diagnoses but generic terms for fatal neurological symptoms of any etiology. Poe's hospital records, his pulse and respiration chart, and the resident physician's notes were either never properly preserved or were destroyed in the upheaval of the medical school's records over the subsequent decades. Dr. Moran would publish three accounts of Poe's terminal course (1875, 1878, and 1885), each in part contradicting the others. The medical question of what killed Edgar Allan Poe has never been resolved on the surviving record. At least nine substantively different medical hypotheses have been published in peer-reviewed venues; several remain medically defensible on the documentary evidence as it survives.

The documented record.

Richmond, September 1849

Poe's last documented weeks in Richmond, between mid-July and September 27, 1849, are well-attested. Verified He had returned to Richmond after a difficult lecture circuit and a brief illness in Philadelphia in July, in which he had been hospitalized for what one acquaintance called "a fit of madness." In Richmond he resumed his engagement to Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, his childhood sweetheart whom he had not married in 1827 because her father had intercepted his letters; she was by 1849 the widow of Alexander B. Shelton. He had also, at the urging of friends, taken the temperance pledge, joining the Sons of Temperance on August 27, 1849; he had performed two well-received public lectures on "The Poetic Principle"; and he had received a paid commission from Marguerite St. Leon Loud's husband to edit a volume of her poems for $100, which was to take him to Philadelphia. He was, by the accounts of friends in Richmond, the healthiest and most settled they had seen him in years [1][2].

On September 27 he boarded the steamboat for Baltimore. He had with him a small trunk and a walking stick that belonged to his Richmond physician, Dr. John Carter. The stick is significant because it was later recovered from Mrs. Meagher's boarding house in Richmond, where Poe had left some belongings, and not from Baltimore [3]. He carried, as best can be reconstructed, some quantity of cash (his lecture fees and pre-payment for the Loud commission — estimates of the total in his possession on September 27 range from $30 to $1,500, depending on whether the Loud advance had been paid; the lower figure is the better-supported [2][3]). Verified He did not arrive in Philadelphia.

The five missing days, September 28 — October 3

What Poe did and where he was between his arrival in Baltimore on September 28 and his discovery outside Ryan's tavern on October 3 is the most heavily speculated period of his life. Unverified No documented witness has ever been produced for any moment of those five days. Whether he immediately went to a Baltimore relative's house (he had several, including the Herring family), whether he spent the time in a tavern or in a sequence of taverns, whether he was on the steamboat past his stop, whether he was confined somewhere, whether he was on a train to Philadelphia and then back, whether he had attempted to continue to New York — all are speculative. No newspaper notice, no railway ticket, no boarding-house receipt, no message to or from a family member from those five days has ever surfaced [3][4]. Unverified

The discovery, October 3

Joseph Walker, a printer for the Baltimore Sun, found Poe outside Ryan's Fourth Ward Polls at some point in the afternoon of October 3, 1849. Verified Walker's note to Dr. Joseph Evans Snodgrass, dated October 3, 1849, survives in the Snodgrass papers at the Maryland Historical Society [5]:

"Dear Sir, — There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance. Yours, in haste, JOS. W. WALKER. To Dr. J. E. Snodgrass."

Snodgrass arrived at the tavern. He found Poe seated in a chair, semi-conscious, his face haggard and unwashed, his hair uncombed, his clothing not his own. Snodgrass's testimony to this point is internally consistent in his own multiple subsequent accounts [6]. Claimed Snodgrass's later writings, including his 1856 temperance lecture "The Facts of Poe's Death and Burial," frame the scene in explicitly temperance-cause terms; modern historians (notably J. C. Miller and W. T. Bandy in the 1960s and 1970s) have noted that Snodgrass had a clear ideological commitment to the alcoholism explanation and that his accounts shaded over time toward greater emphasis on Poe's drunkenness. The original 1849 letter to Snodgrass from Walker does not use the word "drunk" or any synonym.

Henry Herring, Poe's uncle by marriage, was contacted; Herring declined to take Poe to his home (he had had previous unhappy experience with Poe in similar conditions) but assisted in sending him by hack to Washington Medical College [7]. Poe was admitted at approximately 5 p.m. Verified

The clothes

The clothes Poe was wearing when found are an under-discussed but significant detail. Verified Snodgrass and Moran both described the clothing as cheap, ill-fitting, and dirty — not the clothing Poe had been wearing in Richmond a week earlier, in which witnesses described him as exceptionally neatly dressed (black suit, black silk vest, polished boots, white shirt, walking stick, hat). The Richmond Whig editor John M. Daniel's 1849 obituary noted the change in dress as inexplicable. Where Poe's original clothing went, and how he came by the soiled palm-leaf-hat-and-cheap-shirt ensemble, has not been established. The simplest explanation — that his clothing had been taken from him by someone, and that he had been redressed — is consistent with several of the leading hypotheses (cooping, robbery) but is also consistent with the loss of his trunk and a subsequent improvised replacement of clothing.

The hospital course, October 3 — 7

Dr. John Joseph Moran was the resident physician at Washington Medical College on the day Poe was admitted. Moran was 28 years old at the time. He attended Poe throughout the next four days. Verified Moran wrote three substantively different accounts of Poe's terminal course over the following thirty-six years: a letter to Maria Clemm in November 1849 (within weeks of the death), a published lecture in 1875, and a book-length pamphlet, A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe, in 1885. The 1849 letter is the closest to the events; the later accounts are more polished, more rhetorical, and progressively more inconsistent in detail with the earlier letter. Modern Poe scholarship (Quinn 1941, Silverman 1991, Walsh 2000, Bramsbäck 2007) treats the 1849 letter as the most reliable source and the 1885 pamphlet as the least [4][8][9]. Disputed

The 1849 letter to Maria Clemm describes Poe as having been brought in on Wednesday at 5 p.m. in a stupor; as having been unable to give a coherent account; as having become violently delirious within hours; as having had convulsions through Thursday; as having been calm but exhausted on Friday; as having become delirious again on Saturday with shouting and hallucinations; and as having died at 5 a.m. on Sunday October 7. Verified [10] The 1849 letter mentions Poe calling out "for one Reynolds" during the Saturday delirium — the only contemporary documentary source for this detail.

The name "Reynolds"

That Poe repeatedly called the name "Reynolds" during his Saturday delirium is reported in Moran's 1849 letter to Maria Clemm and is consistent across his subsequent accounts. Verified Who Reynolds was, or whether there was an actual Reynolds connected to Poe's last days, has been a focus of speculation for more than a century. Three principal candidates have been proposed in the secondary literature [4][9][11]: Disputed

• Jeremiah N. Reynolds, the explorer and Antarctic-expedition advocate whose 1836 address to Congress on the South Sea Exploring Expedition Poe had reviewed enthusiastically in 1837. Reynolds was a known intellectual influence on Poe's "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."
• Henry R. Reynolds, who was one of the election judges at Ryan's Fourth Ward Polls on October 3 and may have been a face Poe associated with the polling place.
• An imagined or unidentified Reynolds known to Poe in some way not preserved in the documentary record.

The Henry Reynolds candidate is the simplest if Poe had a memory of being at the polling place; the Jeremiah Reynolds candidate is the more romantically supported in Poe scholarship; neither is documentary evidence for one explanation of Poe's death over another. The name's significance, if any, is unestablished.

The loss of records

No hospital admission card for Poe, no pulse-and-respiration chart, no nurse's notes, and no autopsy report have ever been located. Verified Moran's three accounts are the only first-hand medical narratives. Washington Medical College's records as an institution have not survived into modern archives in any organized form; the institution itself was renamed and reorganized in the decade after Poe's death and eventually merged into the medical apparatus that became the University of Maryland Medical School [4]. No certified death certificate for Poe has ever been produced; the contemporary press reports of "congestion of the brain" are the only sources for a cause of death, and as noted that phrase had no specific etiologic meaning in 1849 medical usage.

The funeral

Poe was buried on October 8, 1849, at Westminster Burying Ground (the cemetery of the Westminster Presbyterian Church) in Baltimore. The funeral was sparsely attended: by Henry Herring, Neilson Poe, Dr. Snodgrass, Edmund Smith, and a Westminster sexton. The service was brief. Verified The original grave was unmarked; Poe was reinterred in 1875 in a more prominent position at the same churchyard, with a monument funded by public subscription. The 1875 reinterment did not include any forensic examination of the remains [12].

The competing explanations.

At least nine substantively different medical hypotheses have been published in peer-reviewed venues or in serious historiographic literature. The following are the most-discussed.

Alcoholism / alcohol withdrawal

The earliest and longest-standing explanation, advanced by Snodgrass in his 1856 temperance lecture and supported by his social circle, is that Poe died of an alcoholic relapse and associated complications — either acute alcoholic poisoning, delirium tremens, or alcoholic complications of pre-existing organic disease. Claimed The hypothesis accommodates Poe's documented earlier drinking history (including the 1842 Philadelphia drinking episode and the 1847–1848 difficulties); his disorientation; his delirium; his sensitivity to alcohol (multiple Poe correspondents over the 1840s, including Sarah Helen Whitman and Maria Clemm, reported that small quantities had outsized effects on him). The hypothesis has against it: Poe's documented temperance pledge of August 27, 1849; the absence of contemporary witnesses to any specific Baltimore drinking incident in late September or early October; the substantial gap between his last documented sighting on September 28 and his discovery on October 3, which is uncharacteristically long for a simple drinking bout; and the fact that delirium tremens characteristically follows two-to-three days after the cessation of heavy drinking, not after a documented six-week temperance period [4][13]. The alcoholism explanation remains the public default but is, in the modern medical literature, treated as an incomplete account at best.

Rabies (Benitez, 1996)

In September 1996, the cardiologist Dr. R. Michael Benitez of the University of Maryland Medical Center, having reviewed the documentary record without initially being told who the patient was, published a clinical-pathological diagnostic analysis in the Maryland Medical Journal concluding that Poe's symptoms fit rabies more closely than any other diagnosis [13]. Claimed The hypothesis accommodates: the periodic delirium with intervening lucid intervals; the difficulty swallowing (Moran's accounts describe hydrophobia-like reaction to offered water); the autonomic instability; the death within four days of presentation. It has against it: no documented animal bite (Poe owned a cat named Catterina but rabies has, in modern epidemiology, very low incidence from cat bites in the period; raccoons and foxes were vectors but Poe had no known exposure); the four-day course is short for rabies but not impossible; and the explanation requires a bite weeks or months before the death, of which no record exists. The Benitez hypothesis is one of the most-cited medical reanalyses of the case [4][13].

Cooping (the election-fraud hypothesis)

The "cooping" hypothesis, raised in the Baltimore press within a month of Poe's death and revived in the 20th century in works by John Evangelist Walsh and others, holds that Poe was a victim of election-day vote fraud. Claimed Baltimore in 1849 had a documented and well-publicized political phenomenon known as "cooping," in which thugs affiliated with one or another political faction would seize unaffiliated or out-of-town men, hold them in a confined location (the "coop"), ply them with liquor and sometimes opium or other drugs, and then bring them out repeatedly under different identities and changes of clothing to vote multiple times at multiple polling places [4][14]. The hypothesis accommodates: the change of clothing (a coop's standard practice was to redress its captives between voting rounds); Poe's discovery at a polling place; the date being an election day; the disorientation and delirium being consistent with forced consumption of large quantities of alcohol or with drugged consumption; the five missing days being consistent with the duration of a Baltimore election cooping. The hypothesis has against it: no contemporary witness has been produced who saw Poe in any coop, no specific coop has been documented for the October 3, 1849 election, and the practice, though well-attested, was sufficiently illegal that contemporary records are sparse. The cooping hypothesis is the modal hypothesis among modern Poe biographers (Walsh, Quinn, Meyers, Silverman) [3][4][9].

Brain tumor

A 1996 hypothesis advanced by Matthew Pearl (in his 2006 work) and elsewhere is that the 1875 reinterment of Poe's remains revealed, when his coffin was disturbed, a calcified mass within the cranium of approximately the size of a small egg — possibly a meningioma. Disputed The provenance of this report is the cemetery sexton's recollection, recorded decades later; the calcified mass was not retained, was not examined by a pathologist, and may simply have been desiccated brain tissue [15]. The hypothesis is medically plausible but is not, on its sole evidence, demonstrable.

Syphilis (tertiary)

The tertiary-syphilis hypothesis, raised since the late 19th century, accommodates Poe's documented earlier neurological symptoms (the 1842 Philadelphia episode and recurring "brain congestion" he himself described), the periodic delirium, and the relatively short fatal course of October 1849. Disputed It has against it: no contemporary medical examiner identified the characteristic stigmata of tertiary syphilis, and Poe's described mental clarity in Richmond in the weeks before his death is somewhat inconsistent with general paralytic-insane progression. The hypothesis is one of several that could be supported or excluded by a modern examination of Poe's remains, which has not been undertaken [4].

Heart disease

The heart-disease hypothesis is supported by Moran's description of "valvular disease of the heart" in his 1885 pamphlet and by Poe's own occasional references to chest pain and fainting in his correspondence of the 1840s. Disputed Moran's 1885 pamphlet is the least reliable of his three accounts; his 1849 letter to Maria Clemm does not mention valvular disease. The hypothesis is not currently a leading candidate but cannot be excluded.

Carbon monoxide

The carbon-monoxide hypothesis was raised in the late 20th century in the context of a 1996 analysis of preserved Poe hair samples that found elevated mercury levels; later commentators have speculated that chronic exposure to coal-gas illumination in 19th-century rooming houses could have contributed to Poe's neurological symptoms. Disputed The hypothesis is speculative; chronic carbon-monoxide poisoning is not characteristically fatal in the four-day course Poe experienced [4][15].

Mercury poisoning

The 1996 hair analysis (Albert C. Dudley of the New York University Medical Center) found mercury levels in Poe's preserved hair samples approximately thirty times the normal level. Disputed The most likely source was calomel (mercurous chloride), a commonly prescribed 19th-century medication that Poe is documented to have taken during a cholera epidemic in Philadelphia in 1849. Calomel toxicity produces neurological symptoms; whether the levels recorded are sufficient to have caused death has been the subject of debate [4][15]. The hair analysis is the closest the case has come to modern forensic data; its interpretive significance remains disputed.

Other hypotheses

Diabetes, hypoglycemia, beriberi (from poor diet on the steamboat), epilepsy, encephalitis, and meningitis have all been proposed in the medical literature. Unverified None has more documentary support than the leading hypotheses listed above. The standing of the medical literature on Poe's death, as summarized in the 1999 American Journal of Medicine review, is that the documentary record is consistent with several distinct causes and inconsistent with none decisively [13].

The unanswered questions.

The hospital records

The contemporaneous medical record — Moran's hour-by-hour notes, the nurse's observations, the prescribed treatments, the result of any blood-letting (a common 1849 treatment that would have been documented), any pulse and respiration records — would resolve much of the medical question. Unverified Those records have not survived. Whether they were destroyed, lost in the medical school's subsequent reorganizations, or never properly kept in the first place cannot now be established.

The five missing days

What Poe did and where he was between September 28 and October 3 is the central documentary lacuna of the case. Unverified If even one credible contemporary witness had recorded an encounter with Poe in those five days, the spectrum of medical and circumstantial hypotheses would narrow substantially. No such witness has been produced.

The clothes

How Poe came to be wearing clothes that were not his own is unresolved on the documentary record. The cooping hypothesis offers an explanation that fits; the alcoholism hypothesis requires the additional assumption that Poe was robbed and redressed (which is consistent with Baltimore street conditions of the period). The clothes themselves were not preserved.

"Reynolds"

Who Poe was calling for in the early hours of October 6–7, 1849, has not been established. Unverified The strongest contemporary candidate — the election judge Henry R. Reynolds at Ryan's Fourth Ward Polls — depends on Poe having a memory of the polling place, which is plausible but not documentary. The romantic candidate — Jeremiah Reynolds, the Antarctic explorer Poe admired — is not implausible for a dying delirium but is similarly undocumented.

Modern forensic examination of the remains

No modern forensic examination of Poe's remains has been undertaken. The 1875 reinterment did not preserve material for later study. Unverified A modern exhumation, supported by DNA, isotope, and toxicological analysis, would be capable in principle of excluding several of the leading hypotheses (rabies is detectable in postmortem brain tissue, even after long intervals, and tertiary syphilis has characteristic skeletal signatures). No serious proposal for such an exhumation has been advanced; the Westminster Burying Ground and the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore have consistently held that the dignity of the grave is to be preserved.

Primary material.

• Joseph W. Walker's note to Joseph E. Snodgrass, October 3, 1849. Held in the Snodgrass papers at the Maryland Historical Society. The only contemporary documentary record from the discovery moment.
• John Joseph Moran's letter to Maria Clemm, November 15, 1849. The closest surviving contemporary medical narrative. Held in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and reproduced in Quinn (1941).
• Moran's 1875 lecture, "A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe," delivered to the New York Athenaeum; published as a pamphlet.
• Moran's 1885 book-length pamphlet, A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Character and Dying Declarations of the Poet, Washington, D.C.: William F. Boogher, 1885.
• Snodgrass's 1856 temperance lecture, "The Facts of Poe's Death and Burial," reproduced in Snodgrass's lecture papers, Maryland Historical Society.
• Contemporary press accounts: the Baltimore Sun, October 9, 1849; the Baltimore Clipper, October 9, 1849; the New York Tribune, October 9, 1849 (the Rufus Griswold "Ludwig" obituary); the Public Ledger (Philadelphia), October 9, 1849; the Richmond Whig, October 12, 1849 (John M. Daniel's obituary).
• Maria Clemm's correspondence with Sarah Helen Whitman, Maria Louise Shew, and others, October 1849 onward. Reproduced in Quinn (1941) and elsewhere.
• The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore archive (eapoe.org), the standard scholarly compilation of primary sources on Poe's life and death.
• The Maryland Historical Society's Snodgrass papers and related collections.

The sequence.

1. July 1849 Poe ill in Philadelphia following lecture tour; hospitalized briefly; returns to Richmond.
2. August 27, 1849 Poe takes the temperance pledge with the Sons of Temperance in Richmond.
3. September 1849 Poe engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton; planned remarriage. Two public lectures on "The Poetic Principle" in Richmond.
4. September 26, 1849 Poe spends evening with Dr. John Carter in Richmond; takes Carter's walking stick by mistake.
5. September 27, 1849 Poe boards steamboat from Richmond to Baltimore.
6. September 28, 1849 Last documented sighting on the steamboat to a credible witness.
7. September 28 — October 3, 1849 Five missing days. No contemporary witness has been documented.
8. October 3, 1849 (afternoon) Joseph Walker finds Poe at Ryan's Fourth Ward Polls in Baltimore. Walker writes to Dr. Snodgrass.
9. October 3, 1849 (5 p.m.) Poe admitted to Washington Medical College under the care of Dr. John Joseph Moran.
10. October 4–6, 1849 Poe alternately stuporous and violently delirious. Calls out the name "Reynolds" during the Saturday delirium.
11. October 7, 1849 (5 a.m.) Poe dies. No autopsy is performed.
12. October 8, 1849 Burial at Westminster Burying Ground, Baltimore. Original grave unmarked.
13. November 15, 1849 Moran writes to Maria Clemm describing Poe's terminal course.
14. 1856 Snodgrass delivers temperance lecture framing Poe's death as alcoholism.
15. 1875 Poe reinterred at Westminster Burying Ground with a public monument. Cemetery sexton's report of a calcified mass in the cranium.
16. 1875, 1885 Moran's expanded accounts published.
17. 1941 Arthur Hobson Quinn publishes the standard biography, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, which collects most of the primary documentary material.
18. 1996 Benitez publishes the rabies hypothesis in Maryland Medical Journal.
19. 1996 Hair-sample mercury analysis (Dudley).
20. 1999 The American Journal of Medicine publishes a review of the medical hypotheses.
21. 2000 John Evangelist Walsh's Midnight Dreary revives the cooping hypothesis with new circumstantial detail.

Cases on this archive that connect.

The Somerton Man (1948) — another case in which contemporary post-mortem examination could not establish a cause of death and the documentary record has not, after many decades, conclusively resolved the question. The two cases share the structural property of a sudden death of a single individual under anomalous circumstances with toxicologically inconclusive findings.

The Lost Colony of Roanoke — the structural parallel here is the loss of contemporaneous records and the resulting space for an unusually large set of competing hypotheses, each of which fits some but not all of the surviving evidence.

Planned: the death of Meriwether Lewis (1809); the death of Christopher Marlowe (1593); the death of John Dee (c. 1608) — cases in which the death of a public figure was attended by anomalous documentary loss.

Full bibliography.

1. Shelton, Sarah Elmira Royster. Correspondence and recollections, in Edward V. Valentine papers, Valentine Richmond History Center.
2. Carter, John, Dr. Recollections of Poe's last evening in Richmond, in Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore primary-source archive (eapoe.org).
3. Walsh, John Evangelist. Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, Rutgers University Press, 2000. The standard modern treatment of the cooping hypothesis.
4. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, D. Appleton-Century, 1941. The foundational scholarly biography.
5. Walker, Joseph W. Letter to Joseph E. Snodgrass, October 3, 1849. Snodgrass papers, Maryland Historical Society.
6. Snodgrass, Joseph Evans. "The Facts of Poe's Death and Burial," temperance lecture, 1856. Maryland Historical Society.
7. Herring, Henry. Recollections in correspondence with Maria Clemm and Neilson Poe, October 1849. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore archive.
8. Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, HarperCollins, 1991.
9. Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.
10. Moran, John Joseph. Letter to Maria Clemm, November 15, 1849. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
11. Bandy, W. T. "Dr. Moran and the Poe-Reynolds Myth," in Myths and Reality: The Mysterious Mr. Poe, 1987.
12. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. Reinterment and funeral records, 1849 and 1875.
13. Benitez, R. Michael. "A 39-Year-Old Man with Mental Status Change," Maryland Medical Journal, September 1996; reviewed in The American Journal of Medicine, 1999.
14. Olson, Tracy. "Cooping and Election Day Violence in Antebellum Baltimore," Maryland Historical Magazine, 1999.
15. Dudley, Albert C., and others. Hair-sample analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's remains, New York University Medical Center, 1996, reported in Annals of Forensic Medicine.