![]() ![]() Valdemar's two physicians inform the narrator of their patient's poor condition. Valdemar consents to the experiment and informs the narrator by letter that his doctors expect him to die by midnight of the following evening. He considers experimenting on Valdemar, an author whom he had previously mesmerized and who has recently been diagnosed with phthisis ( tuberculosis). ![]() 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 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. The narrator presents the facts of the extraordinary case of his friend Ernest Valdemar, which have incited public discussion. Poe admitted it to be a work of pure fiction in letters to his correspondents. 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. 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. ![]() The American Review and Broadway Journal (simultaneously) Illustration for "The Facts in the Case of M. ![]()
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