Mr. Poe and Dr. Moran: A Medical Biography of Edgar Allan Poe

The staggering number and startling focal range of literary biographies of Edgar Allan Poe that have been published since his death in 1849 are, at least in part, a testament to his perennial importance, not merely to American literary history, but to the emergence of international popular culture. However, their number and focal tendencies are also fed by a feverish fascination with the circumstances of Poe’s last days, marked by seemingly mysterious delirious illness, and of his death. This leads Dwight Thomas’s recently published and long-awaited Mr. Poe and Dr. Moran: A Medical Biography of Edgar Allan Poe to justifiably characterize Poe’s death as “the most controversial mortality in American literary studies” (568).Thomas’s name will already be familiar to most scholars and students of Poe, primarily due to his coauthorship (with D. K. Jackson) of the invaluable reference The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1987). Indeed, Thomas’s introduction to Mr. Poe and Dr. Moran characterizes it as “a coda to the Poe Log” (ix), one that serves as a useful reference text but also aims to be a much more “readable narrative” (x). The book succeeds admirably on both these counts, retaining the textually rich documentary approach of its predecessor while integrating its copious references to writings by and about Poe into an engaging biographical narrative that begins with a chronological depiction of Poe’s life before segueing into an equally detailed account of his legacy and reputation into the early twentieth century.Thomas’s detailed documentary-biography is explicitly motivated by the markedly speculative and even fabulist tendency of many previous Poe biographies, which, in terms of accuracy and reliability, are a decidedly mixed bag, ranging from lapidary, tendentious bio-novellas like Peter Ackroyd’s Poe: A Life Cut Short (2008) to lengthy romantic eulogies such as Kenneth Silverman’s classic Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (1991) to painstakingly researched works of intellectual history like John Tresch’s recent The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science (2021). Thomas begins by noting that many of Poe’s previous biographers assume “romantic” or “reverential” postures toward the writer, his life, and his death. Because of this, they tend to fuse legend with history, further dramatizing, idolizing, or demonizing their famously troubled and troubling subject.Thomas explicitly avoids such tendencies, opting instead for a “clinical” posture and “irreverent” tone (x), as Mr. Poe and Dr. Moran seeks to correct some of the more persistent and popular fables about Poe’s life and death. Thomas aptly describes his approach as that of a “literary archaeologist” (xi), focusing closely on the material and textual traces of Poe’s life and relationships, including those that shaped his posthumous reception by informing the (often romanticizing or demonizing, polemical or partisan) conclusions of earlier biographers. Where Tresch’s 2021 biographical study uses Poe’s life and writings to explore the development of scientific and technological culture in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, Thomas’s approaches Poe’s life, death, and literary afterlife via developing discourses of addiction and substance use, specifically alcoholism. In this respect, it bears comparison with Molly Lefebure’s controversial biography of Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium (1977). Much as Lefebure’s book sought to reinterpret the British poet’s behaviors, relationships, and writing through the modern medical conception of opiate addiction, Thomas’s rereads Poe’s life and writings through that of alcoholism as a disease.As the title suggests, Thomas’s book is particularly interested in the shifting claims and interpretations of Poe’s life and the cause of his death propounded by the last medical doctor to attend him during his final days, namely Baltimore physician Dr. John J. Moran. However, Thomas engages with Moran’s manifold, and often contradictory, statements about Poe in a highly skeptical manner, arguing persuasively that they reveal more about Moran’s own assumptions and motivations than they do about Poe’s medical condition during his last days of life.Thomas paints a memorable picture of Moran, “an energetic provincial man of business, a recognizable American type who could have stepped out of a Sinclair Lewis novel” (461). He stresses from the outset that Moran “merits our consideration only as an eyewitness, not as a healer” (5) since his “ten-year career of writing and lecturing on Poe’s death” was “a remarkable exercise in self-promotion and rascality” (8). In the years after Poe’s death, Thomas explains, Moran would attempt to combat the picture of Poe as a maniacal drunkard that Rufus Griswold’s “Memoir” did so much to popularize. Thomas notes that the popularity of Griswold’s account stemmed in part from its almost mythical hyperboles and distortions; Griswold’s “Poe generated the impact of fictional villains like Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Iago. Here was a creative genius who was also the perfect stinker and cad, an individual totally devoid of social responsibility and normal human emotions, and an inveterate drunk to boot!” (416).In his crusade to advance his own fame by saving Poe’s posthumous reputation from Griswold’s calumnies, Moran presented Poe’s often piously Spiritualist or Christian admirers with “an expurgated version of events in which the dying genius recoils at the very mention of alcohol and then acknowledges the truth of a most saccharine and platitudinous Christianity,” a “biographical revision” that “amounted to a metamorphosis” (14). Through Moran’s lectures and writings nearly three decades after Poe’s death, the “godless sinner castigated by George Gilfillan and other clerical reviewers of the 1850s had now been reborn as an inspired witness to Divinity, carefully edited and amended for adulatory sermonizing” (514).While this picture of Poe was warmly received and repeated by Moran’s audiences, and was imported into many Poe biographies in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth, Thomas establishes forcibly that it was in its own way as distorted, opportunistic, and tendentious as Griswold’s “Memoirs.” Where Moran’s later accounts insist that alcohol use had no part to play in Poe’s illness or death, Thomas musters an abundance of textual evidence to support his argument that the real “cause of Poe’s symptoms,” and ultimately his premature death, was “alcohol withdrawal syndrome” (18), and that his infamously strange behavior in Baltimore in July 1849 was caused by “ambulatory hallucinosis with prolonged derangement,” which is a “recognized prodrome to delirium tremens, the most disturbing and dangerous [alcohol] withdrawal phenomenon” (383).That this was not recognized by Griswold, Moran, other of Poe’s contemporaries, or his later nineteenth-century biographers is hardly surprising, since the modern medical concept of alcoholism would not emerge until nearly a century after Poe’s death. As Thomas explains, “Poe’s nineteenth-century biographers were woefully ignorant of medical matters. They understood neither the causes of alcohol addiction nor the widely divergent patterns of consumption which it can involve. When confronted with a biographical subject suffering from this multifarious syndrome, they reacted with evasive silence or self-righteous condemnation” (569). In reframing and interpreting Poe’s relationship with alcohol, Thomas delves into the conflicting historical conceptions of substance use/abuse and its effects that predominated during Poe’s life and the years immediately after his death, tracing how these ideas informed the claims of Poe’s biographers, from Griswold through Moran and on to more recent commentators. Thomas contrasts these ideas with the modern medical conception of alcoholism as a disease, a concept primarily developed by E. M. Jellinek (1890–1963), particularly in his landmark study The Disease Concept of Alcoholism (1946, 1960). Thomas reinterprets Poe’s relationship with alcohol via Jellinek’s typology, which introduces a distinction between the more commonly known delta and the less familiar gamma alcoholic. In Thomas’s words, “while the delta alcoholic cannot abstain from alcohol but retains a measure of control over the amount consumed, the gamma alcoholic usually retains some ability to abstain but suffers a loss of control when consumption is resumed” (26). Thomas asserts that as “a gamma alcoholic in E. M. Jellinek’s typology, Poe could usually resist that first drink,” but having had that first drink would become “at his most vulnerable,” “hardly able to refuse” subsequent drinks, to the point of eventual delirium and unconsciousness (213).In short, Thomas’s close textual examination of a range of writings by and about Poe allows him to make a compelling case for Poe’s having been a gamma alcoholic, while Jellinek’s clinical typology provides Thomas with a lens through which to newly interpret these writings. Thomas revisits a great deal of textual material (much of it present in The Poe Log) that has been available to Poe biographers and documentarians for decades and augments it with material that has come to light only over the past twenty years, as widespread digitization has led to the creation of numerous searchable archives for many nineteenth-century periodicals and other relevant sources.The result is a useful, research-intensive, and textually rich biography that is a must-read not only for scholars of Poe and mid-nineteenth-century American literary history but also for those with an interest in cultural histories of alcohol use and the medical humanities more broadly. While Thomas’s account of Poe’s alcoholism and its connection to his delirium and death is unlikely to convince every reader (especially if they have their own obsessive speculation or cherished historical hypothesis on the matter, as many Poe mavens surely do), it is nevertheless one that is highly plausible and presented in a painstaking and highly informative way.

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