'I say to you that I am dead!': Medical Experiment and the Limits of Personhood in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' (1845)

Bricked up in walls, hidden under floorboards, or left in unmarked graves, Edgar Allan Poe's dead and dying bodies suffer continual violation and exploitation. Poe's fascination with inappropriate burial and exhumation reflects pressing antebellum fears of bodysnatching--a trade in dead bodies to supply medical schools, which targeted the corpses of the nation's noncitizens: African Americans, Native Americans, the institutionalised, and the itinerant. In this article Murray contends that Poe's tales of human mesmeric experiment, framed in the context of medical grave-robbing and exploitation, examine marginal states of being that are constructed as 'beneath' the status of full citizenship.