The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe

Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe on our website. You can listen online to free English audiobook “The Facts in the Case of M. As they prepare him for burial, however, the tongue begins to vibrate and a minute later answers the question the doctor put to the patient just before his death. The next day, the patient’s eyes roll upward, his cheeks lose their colour, and his mouth falls open. He asks the doctor not to wake him, but to let him die without pain. The dying man feels no pain and responds to questions without rising from his trance. Valdemar, written in 1845, is an example of a story which we would now class as 'horror', but which Edgar Allan Poe submitted to the public as an essay.It is a tale about 'mesmerism', which was then a newly fashionable method of inducing a trance-like state.It developed later into what we term today hypnotism. As the patient’s breath and heartbeat slow, the doctor successfully hypnotizes him. Seven months later, the doctor is called to the dying man’s bedside. A friend agrees to be the subject of this experiment. He is curious to see what would happen to an individual put under hypnosis while dying.

A doctor has become fascinated by mesmerism. Robert Collyer, an English magnetic healer visiting Boston, wrote to Poe saying that he himself had performed a similar act to revive a man who had been pronounced dead (in truth, the man was actually a drunken sailor. Many readers thought that the story was a scientific report. Sidney Doane that recounted a surgical operation performed while a patient was 'in magnetic sleep.' The letter served as inspiration for Poe's tale.

While editor of The Broadway Journal, Poe printed a letter from a New York physician named Dr A. Valdemar is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe