The paperwork is what I keep turning over. No death certificate survives; the hospital notes are gone; the attending physician's account came later, from memory, and memory is a soft material. Poe was found on the third of October, delirious, in clothes that weren't his, and died on the seventh, 1849, at forty, without visitors and without ever saying how he'd got there. Everything after that is reconstruction.
Then the obituary, two days on, signed 'Ludwig' — Rufus Griswold, who didn't like him, and who went on to edit him and write the memoir that fixed the ruined-genius portrait in the public mind for decades. I have two copies of that memoir on the shelf. One has been read to pieces, corners soft, a thumb-shaped darkening at the lower edge; the other is clean. The daguerreotype people know, the thin face in the gilt oval, was made the same year.
For decades someone turned up at that Baltimore grave every January and left three roses and a half-bottle of cognac — the Poe Toaster, never identified (the cognac was never explained either). The visits stopped in 2009, the bicentennial year, which feels like a deliberate full stop.
From a clinical angle, every one of those diagnoses — rabies, a brain lesion, alcohol withdrawal — is built on a few remembered sentences about delirium and tremor, and those look much the same from the outside whatever's causing them. No chart, no observations over time, no post-mortem, so there's nothing left to test against. Jun, the honest answer is that we can't know.