By late afternoon, Poe was found in "great distress" at the Ryan Hotel at 44 E. Lombard St., about six blocks north of President Street Station.
"He was, however, coherent enough to send for help," Powell writes, and the first people on the scene were Dr. J.E. Snodgrass, an old friend of Poe's, and Poe's uncle, Henry Herring.
The men, worried that they might have to pay for Poe's care, decided it was best to shuttle him off to the public ward for indigents at the Baltimore City and Marine Hospital on Broadway.
The hospital was under the direction of Dr. J.J. Moran, who had recently taken over the facility that had been established as the Washington Medical College.
"The hospital's name where Poe died is often wrong. He did not die at the Washington Medical College. It had been renamed the Baltimore City and Marine Hospital on Sept. 17, 1849, several weeks before he died," Powell said.
The now-closed hospital later had a third name, Church Home Hospital, which is probably the one that is better known by people today.
An orderly making rounds in the early morning on Oct. 7, 1849, discovered Poe's lifeless body lying in his bed.
He was buried late the next afternoon in the Presbyterian cemetery at Fayette and Greene streets, with only five mourners looking on, according to Powell.
So what took Poe's life? Through the years, scholars and medical experts have suggested - in addition to alcoholism - epilepsy, diabetes, cerebral meningitis, mercury poisoning, a drug overdose and even rabies.
Powell suggests that the poet died from something "like cardiopulmonary collapse, resulting from exposure (malnutrition, lack of sleep, cold, shock of disorientation), a complication of the starved defenses."
Powell said that an exact "cause of death still excites people," and "won't be truly known until someday when his body is exhumed and its DNA examined."
Powell said that five weeks later, Moran wrote a "meticulous account" to Clemm giving a florid view of Poe's death, more fiction than fact, even going so far to say that he personally cared for the dying poet as nurses manned the door.
"He wasn't even in the hospital at the time and probably had no idea Poe was a patient under his roof," Powell said. "In an 1885 booklet about Poe's death, Moran illustrates the room in which he died. Unfortunately, the room he chose was not a room at all but a stairwell."
In another piece of self-promotion, Moran said Poe's body lay in repose in the hospital's rotunda for two days, while 50 women queued up to clip a lock of his hair.
"This is pure nonsense. Moran didn't even attend Poe's funeral," Powell said with a laugh. "I've done my best to nay-say all of this stuff."
Powell dismisses Moran's accounts and others from the time that scholars have not challenged, saying they are nothing more than "self-serving and disingenuous."
"To suggest that everything possible had been done to comfort the famous poet in his hour of extremity, rather than that he had been warehoused indistinguishably among the ill and unwanted, the drunkards, of his traditional home town," writes Powell, is far from the truth.
fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com
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