Edgar Allan Poe Science Reporter

His wild, sometimes forgotten science writing has a lesson for our COVID moment.

Edgar Allan Poe lived through the harrowing cholera pandemic of the 1830s. He published his story “Masque of the Red Death” in 1842, just after his wife’s first attack from tuberculosis; he would struggle to pay for her care. Poe’s classic story about infection has been in the air the past year and a half for obvious reasons: In that tale, the medieval Prince Prospero and his debauched guests lock themselves inside a palace, thinking its walls will save them from the plague raging outside. Their comeuppance is swift and shocking. In the form of a shrouded corpse, the disease infiltrates the prince’s costume ball, stalking the revelers who drop “one by one” in “the blood-bedewed halls of their revel.” In the last, looming line, “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

While that story taps into the human fear of death from disease, there’s a less familiar aspect of Poe’s life and work that makes him even more relevant to our COVID-era crisis in public health, science, and communication. As I write in my recent book, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, Poe was obsessed with science, and the reasons people doubt or believe it. In his lifetime, scientific practice and explanation were on the rise, but it faced even fiercer opposition than it does today. Though he followed its developments closely and championed its advance, he also pointed out its limits and abuses. In ways that researchers and science communicators today might usefully consider, Poe showed how science’s power depended on political support, on the frank admission of its fallibility—and on telling a good story.

Poe was born in 1809, the same year as Charles Darwin. He was drilled in math and physics at West Point, and, after getting himself kicked out, kept himself informed about the fast-breaking inventions and discoveries of the early 19^th century. Photography, steam engines, telegraphs, and railroads were taken as signs of limitless progress through technical innovation. The discovery and study of geological strata, revealed by excavations to create canals and railways, showed the earth’s relentless and sometimes catastrophic evolution, while new theories for the formation of planets, stars, and galaxies challenged the biblical narrative of creation. The idea that animal species might have evolved through purely material processes found growing support—as well as heated theological resistance.

Meanwhile, a hunger for information and entertainment was met by self-declared “doctors” who preached new health cures and by lecturers who presented wild theories on topics from astronomy to zoology across the country. On Broadway, P.T. Barnum’s American Museum invited debate about “discoveries” such as the “Feejee Mermaid”—a monkey’s upper body sewn to the tail of a fish—while itinerant antebellum tech bros touted investment schemes for electric communications and flying machines.

As these clashes over knowledge and the order of nature raged—and as the storm over slavery was brewing—the U.S. was undergoing a media revolution. The number of newspapers and magazines exploded. News items were cut, copied, and reprinted in other publications not unlike how a retweet spreads text and images across Twitter today, and with just as much uncertainty about the original writer’s intention or credibility.

Poe’s science writing danced back and forth between genres, sometimes explaining, sometimes fictionalizing by using science for dramatic effect. While working for magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, Poe published clear-eyed evaluations of scientific and technical developments. One of his bestselling works was an introduction to conchology, the science of shells. His fictional stories also frequently turned on scientific facts and theories, with fluid mechanics and natural history underwriting his 1841 nautical thriller “A Descent Into the Maelström.” The story sees its narrator sent through the devastating twists of a Norwegian whirlpool, while observation and reasoning save him from watery destruction. In another tale from that year, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe confronted readers with a gruesome puzzle in the form of two corpses: a strangled mother and her decapitated daughter, stuffed up a fireplace in a locked room. In that tale, Poe didn’t simply invent the lurid tropes of the detective story and introduce C. Auguste Dupin, the disarming reasoner who would be the model for Sherlock Holmes. He ventured into contemporary astronomical and biological controversies and dramatized observation and verification, highlighting the difference between plodding empiricism and justified leaps of ingenuity.