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On the Death of Edgar Allan Poe Back in 1996 the theory was advanced that Edgar Allan Poe, that unassailable bastion of American literature (whom even the revisionists have not attempted to defile, though they’ve nailed every other major male writer in this country, from Heavy Herman to Dead Ernest), died of rabies. All those notions of his perishing from alcoholism or drug overdose or some other sort of self-abuse have been superseded. According to Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist, Poe died in a Baltimore hospital from rabies four days after his admission. Since Dr. Benitez’s office is only a block from Poe’s alleged grave, within shouting distance, who would know better? Benitez has not admitted, of course, that the guy in the grave has told him anything about this rabies angle. The good doctor is basing his diagnosis , as he should, on the symptoms associated with the case. The patient was comatose the first day of his admission to a Baltimore hospital, perspired heavily and hallucinated and yelled at imaginary companions the next day, experienced a slight recovery the following day, then lapsed into confusion and belligerence and eventually died the fourth day. Further, during his decline, the patient refused alcohol and had difficulty drinking water. Benitez and a Bangkok-based physician, Dr. Henry Wilde, argue that these are classic symptoms of rabies. (Come to think of it, I have suffered those same symptoms after dealing with my two kids on a long weekend, except that the companion I yelled at was very real and yelled back, and I didn’t turn down alcohol.) Hey, if you really accept the idea that the patient under discussion was Poe, it is easy enough to believe that he might have had rabies. He was awfully fond of black birds—ravens, vultures, condors, etc. (and recall that he is supposed to have died in Baltimore, home of the Orioles, black birds with a streak of red who had some stray genes passed along from an ancestor’s 32 Things Literary, More or Less chance encounter with a cardinal in St. Louis [just speculating here])—so it’s quite conceivable that somewhere along the line Poe was attracted to a rabid bat on the sidewalk, picked it up, fondled it, got nipped, and developed the disease. Maybe. Maybe not. Coulda been a black cat that nailed him—he fooled around with them a lot. And there is the report, though unsubstantiated , that this mysterious patient made some remark about “the hair of the dog that bit him,” which you can’t just automatically dismiss as figurative. What I’m saying is that if you can swallow the notion that it was Poe who died in Baltimore, the rabies bolus is not big enough to choke on. It’s a big deal these days to make long-range diagnoses. If there’s any question at all about the nature of the death of the famous, wealthy, noble, or notorious, somebody’s going to come along now and again with a new theory , a fresh diagnosis. If there are no eyewitness accounts (you know, like a signed statement: “I seen the freight train run right over him—sounded just like a tornader—and lop his feet off onto one side of the tracks and his head off th’other”) and no documented evidence, then these people leave their deaths open to interpretation. Who knows what heroic dimensions the death of Elvis might swell to in a hundred years? While all along we believed he died ignominiously while straining at a very ordinary stool, fools that we are, our grandchildren will live to learn from some persistent physician that Elvis was a CIA operative killed by a Russian spy who replaced the king’s Metamucil with fine-ground Gummy Bears in orange juice, which is just as lethal to the gastrointestinal tract as quick-set cement. But I’m getting tangential here. Let’s get back to this Baltimore case, about which I have my own theory, backed by authoritative documentation. You will note that listed among the patient’s symptoms is his refusal to take alcohol. That, folks, is the clincher for me. They had the wrong man. It is reported, remember, that “Poe” was wearing another man’s clothes when he was found. No, he wasn’t. The guy was wearing his own clothes. It just wasn’t Poe inside of them. Think about it. It...

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