Notes:

Although Poe apparently had prepared a version of this poem for publication, it was never printed during his lifetime and is now apparently lost. The manuscript in Mrs. Shew's possession contained tens stanzas, though Poe may have reduced these to nine. These few fragments are all that Mrs. Shew (later remarried as Mrs. Houghton) could remember of the poem when she wrote to John H. Ingram on January 23, 1875. The final line might instead have read “The large heart . . . .” Ingram published an article about the poem as “Edgar Allan Poe's Lost Poem ‘The Beautiful Physician,’” The Bookman (New York), January 1909, pp. 452-454. The portions of the poem are given in bits and pieces, and not in order, such that it has been necessary to interpret the comments in an effort to recreate the proper sequence. The title of the poem here is taken from Poe's letter to Mrs. Shew from June of 1848. In the article, Ingram calls the poem both “The Beloved Physician” and “The Beautiful Physician,” without addressing the conflict.