him back to sleep quickly or to waken him. As Valdemar shouts "Dead! Dead!" repeatedly, the narrator starts to bring him out of his trance, only for his entire body to immediately decay into a "nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence." Analysis Poe uses particularly detailed descriptions and relatively high levels of gore in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", displaying his own studies of medical texts. Valdemar's eyes at one point leak a "profuse outflowing of a yellowish ichor", for example, though Poe's imagery in the story is best summed up in its final lines: "... his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence." The disgusting imagery almost certainly inspired later fiction, including that of H. P. Lovecraft. These final lines incorporate shock, disgust, and uneasiness into one moment. The ending may also suggest that attempts to appropriate power over death have hideous results and are bound to be unsuccessful. Jeffrey Meyers notes that "Valdemar" may be roughly translated as "valley of the sea", perhaps suggesting both solid and liquid states, as emphasized in the imagery deployed as Valdemar's body goes from its normal solid state to liquid in the final lines. Poe typically uses teeth to symbolize mortality, as with "sepulchral and disgusting" horse's teeth in "Metzengerstein", the obsession with teeth in "Berenice", and the sound of grating teeth in "Hop-Frog". Valdemar's death by tuberculosis, and the attempts to postpone his death, may have been influenced by the experiences of Poe's wife, Virginia. At the time the story was published, she had been suffering from tuberculosis for four years. Poe's extreme detail in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" may have been based on Virginia's suffering. Additionally, Poe may have been inspired by Andrew Jackson Davis, whose lectures on mesmerism he had attended. Valdemar's death, however, is not portrayed sentimentally as Poe's typical theme of "the death of a beautiful woman" portrayed in other works such as "Ligeia" and "Morella". In contrast, the death of this male character is brutal and sensational. Publication history While editor of The Broadway Journal, Poe printed a letter from a New York physician named Dr. A. Sidney Doane that recounted a surgical operation performed while a patient was