Ebola-Poe: A Modern-Day Parallel of the Red Death?

lagues and pestilence have evoked fear and awe since time immemorial. Often viewed as divine retribution, these scourges are mentioned in many cultural and religious texts, including the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud. History itself is punctuated and shaped by epidemics, whose accounts are at the center of such literary works as Boccachio’s Decameron, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera. These works provide rare insight into the impact of real epidemics. Accounts of fictional epidemics, such as Albert Camus’ The Plague or Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of Red Death, are even more fascinating and debatable. Poe’s most famous works are macabre tales of terror, madness, decay, and death. The author’s life has been the subject of numerous medical and psychiatric analyses, and the effects of alcoholism (1) and seizure disorder (2) on his creativity have been studied. Review of The Fall of the House of Usher has implicated porphyria (3) for the psychopathology of Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline. But to our knowledge, a detailed medical analysis of The Masque of Red Death has not been conducted. The tale opens with the description of a mysterious epidemic. “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.” To escape death, Prince Prospero secludes himself and a thousand noblemen in a castellated abbey. The epidemic rages and kills the poor who were left outside to fend for themselves. Six months into their successful bid to avoid the contagion, the callous prince and his friends celebrate within the sealed confines of the abbey, when quite suddenly the disease invades their sanctuary and kills everyone.