Text: Dr. Abraham Oakie (as Medicus), “[Comment on Poe and Epilepsy],” Providence Daily Journal (Providence, RI), vol. XLIX, no. 247, October 16, 1875, p. 2, col. 1

[page 2, column 1, continued:]

Some critic who has been aptly criticised by our townswoman, Mrs. Whitman, in a recent number of the New York Tribune, (reprinted in this paper), affects to have made the discovery that the poet Edgar A. Poe, whose genius belongs to the world, was afflicted with an epileptiform malady, and finds in his poetry innate evidence of this diseased mental condition.

That Poe was an epileptic is untrue; but if he were so, after perusing the writings of his critic, one could but devoutly wish that the malady would prove epidemic among poets, and especially that the critic's genius bad taken some other form, even it epileptiform, if it resulted in such glorious poetic manifestations as it did in the case of Poe.

Mr. Critic, couldn't you produce a little epileptiform poetry of the Poe type? It would prove much more acceptable to the lovers and venerators of poetic genius throughout the world, than your hitherto productions of the non-epileptiform school.

MEDICUS.