High death rates leave Prospero’s dominions “half depopulated.” Poe gives a graphic description of the clinical features and outlines the course of the disease, from the earliest symptoms to the fatal outcome. The story’s opening line, “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country,” indicates that this is not a new disease outbreak but rather a known epidemic, ongoing or reemerging. 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. The epidemic rages and kills the poor who were left outside to fend for themselves. To escape death, Prince Prospero secludes himself and a thousand noblemen in a castellated abbey. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.”

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. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. Blood was its avatar and its seal-the redness and the horror of blood. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. The tale opens with the description of a mysterious epidemic. But to our knowledge, a detailed medical analysis of The Masque of Red Death has not been conducted. Review of The Fall of the House of Usher has implicated porphyria ( 3) for the psychopathology of Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline. 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. Poe’s most famous works are macabre tales of terror, madness, decay, and death. 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. These works provide rare insight into the impact of real epidemics. 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. Often viewed as divine retribution, these scourges are mentioned in many cultural and religious texts, including the Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud. Plagues and pestilence have evoked fear and awe since time immemorial.

The masque of the red death quotes