"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is a short story by the American author Edgar Allan Poe about a mesmerist who puts a man in a suspended hypnotic state at the moment of death. An example of a tale of suspense and horror, it is also to a certain degree a hoax, as it was published without claiming to be fictional, and many at the time of publication (1845) took it to be a factual account. Poe admitted it to be a work of pure fiction in letters to his correspondents.
Plot
The narrator presents the facts of the extraordinary case of his friend Ernest Valdemar, which have incited public discussion. He is interested in mesmerism, a pseudoscience involving bringing a patient into a hypnagogic state by the influence of animal magnetism, a process that later developed into hypnotism. He points out that as far as he knows, no one has ever been mesmerized at the point of death, and he is curious to see what effects mesmerism would have on a dying person. He considers experimenting on Valdemar, an author whom he had previously mesmerized and who has recently been diagnosed with phthisis (tuberculosis).
Valdemar consents to the experiment and informs the narrator by letter that his doctors expect him to die by midnight of the following evening. Valdemar's two physicians inform the narrator of their patient's poor condition. After confirming again that Valdemar is willing to be part of the experiment, the narrator comes back the next night with two nurses and a medical student as witnesses. Again, Valdemar insists he is willing to take part and asks the narrator to hurry for fear he has "deferred it for too long". Valdemar is quickly mesmerized just as both physicians return and serve as additional witnesses.
In a trance, he reports first that he is dying and then that he is dead. The narrator leaves him in a mesmeric state for seven months and checks on him daily with the help of physicians and friends. Meanwhile, Valdemar is without pulse, heartbeat, or perceptible breathing, and his skin is cold and pale.
Finally, the narrator makes attempts to awaken Valdemar by asking questions that are answered with difficulty, as Valdemar's voice emanates from his throat and lolling tongue, but his lips and jaws are frozen in death. In between trance and wakefulness, Valdemar begs the narrator to put him back to sleep quickly or to waken him. As Valdemar shouts "Dead! Dead!" repeatedly, the narrator starts to bring him out of his trance, only for his entire body to immediately decay into a "nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence."
Analysis
Poe uses particularly detailed descriptions and relatively high levels of gore in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", displaying his own studies of medical texts. Valdemar's eyes at one point leak a "profuse outflowing of a yellowish ichor", for example, though Poe's imagery in the story is best summed up in its final lines: "... his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence." The disgusting imagery almost certainly inspired later fiction, including that of H. P. Lovecraft. These final lines incorporate shock, disgust, and uneasiness into one moment. The ending may also suggest that attempts to appropriate power over death have hideous results and are bound to be unsuccessful.
Jeffrey Meyers notes that "Valdemar" may be roughly translated as "valley of the sea", perhaps suggesting both solid and liquid states, as emphasized in the imagery deployed as Valdemar's body goes from its normal solid state to liquid in the final lines.
Poe typically uses teeth to symbolize mortality, as with "sepulchral and disgusting" horse's teeth in "Metzengerstein", the obsession with teeth in "Berenice", and the sound of grating teeth in "Hop-Frog".
Valdemar's death by tuberculosis, and the attempts to postpone his death, may have been influenced by the experiences of Poe's wife, Virginia. At the time the story was published, she had been suffering from tuberculosis for four years. Poe's extreme detail in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" may have been based on Virginia's suffering. Additionally, Poe may have been inspired by Andrew Jackson Davis, whose lectures on mesmerism he had attended. Valdemar's death, however, is not portrayed sentimentally as Poe's typical theme of "the death of a beautiful woman" portrayed in other works such as "Ligeia" and "Morella". In contrast, the death of this male character is brutal and sensational.