"in a magnetic sleep"; the letter served as inspiration for Poe's tale. "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" was published simultaneously in the December 20, 1845, issue of the Broadway Journal and the December 1845 issue of American Review: A Whig Journal—the latter journal used the title "The Facts of M. Valdemar's Case". It was also republished in England, first as a pamphlet edition as "Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis" and later as "The Last Days of M. Valdemar". Reception and critical response Many readers thought that the story was a scientific report. Robert Collyer, an English magnetic healer visiting Boston, wrote to Poe saying that he himself had performed a similar act to revive a man who had been pronounced dead (in truth, the man was actually a drunken sailor who was revived by a hot bath). Collyer reported of the story's success in Boston: "Your account of M. Valdemar's case has been universally copied in this city, and has created a very great sensation." Another Englishman, Thomas South, used the story as a case study in his book Early Magnetism in its Higher Relations to Humanity, published in 1846. A medical student, George C. Eveleth, wrote to Poe: "I have strenuously held that it was true. But I tell you that I strongly suspect it for a hoax." A Scottish reader named Archibald Ramsay wrote to Poe "as a believer in Mesmerism" asking about the story: "It details ... most extraordinary circumstances", he wrote, concerned that it had been labeled a hoax. "For the sake of ... Science and of truth", he requested an answer from Poe himself. Poe's response was that "Hoax is precisely the word suited. ... Some few persons believe it—but I do not—and don't you." Poe received many similar letters, and replied to one such letter from a friend: "P.S. The 'Valdemar Case' was a hoax, of course." In the Daily Tribune, its editor, Horace Greeley, noted "that several good matter-of-fact citizens" were tricked by the story, but "whoever thought it a veracious recital must have the bump of Faith large, very large indeed." Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to Poe about the story to commend him on his talent for "making horrible improbabilities seem near and familiar". The Virginia poet Philip Pendleton Cooke also wrote to Poe, calling the story "the most damnable, vraisemblable, horrible, hair-lifting, shocking, ingenious chapter of fiction that any