The majority opinion today is that alcohol abuse ultimately was
the cause of Poe’s death. That Poe had a history of excessive drinking during his young wife Virginia’s protracted illness from tuberculosis, is well documented. However, his death as a medical result of his supposed alcoholism has never been proven; in fact it is unlikely for
lack of evidence of conditions such as sclerosis of the liver in any of his
medical records.
The earliest evidence of Poe’s reappearance in Baltimore is a note
dated 3 October 1849, written by one J. W. Walker. He supposedly 
discovered Poe and immediately wrote to one of Poe’s old Baltimore acquaintances, Dr. J. E. Snodgrass, at the urgent request of Poe himself:
There is a gentleman rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s
Fourth Ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar
A. Poe, and who appears in great distress. He says that he
is acquainted with you, and I assure you he is in need of
immediate assistance.
Snodgrass later described his own surprisingly careful appraisal of Poe’s
condition and clothing:
His hat – or rather the hat of somebody else, for he had
evidently been robbed of his clothing, or cheated in an
exchange – was a palm leaf one, without a band, and
soiled; his coat of commonest alpaca, and evidently “second-hand” and his pants of gray-mixed cashmere. Dingy
I remember aright while his shirt was sadly crumpled
and soiled.
Dr. Joseph Evan Snodgrass was a religious zealot who, from the early
1850s, preached the gospel of Poe’s death as a result of the sin of a dissolute life as a drunkard.14 Snodgrass went to great lengths to support his
temperance cause at Poe’s expense, ultimately manipulating and exaggerating the evidence for three decades – exaggerations which were not
exposed until after Snodgrass’s own death, in an article published in the
New York Herald in 1881.15 Snodgrass had changed the words of J. W.
Walker, the only eye witness, in his note, to create the falsehood that it
had read “in a state of beastly intoxication” in place of the original “a
gentleman rather the worse for wear.”16
The best source supporting the assertion that Poe suffered an alcoholrelated death was J. P. Kennedy, who wrote in his diary three days after
Poe’s death: “On Sunday last Edgar A. Poe died in town here at a hospital
from the effects of a debauch….He fell in with some companion who
seduced him to the bottle, which was said he renounced some time ago.
The consequence was fever, delirium, and madness…”17 Indeed, on August 27th, at a Sons of Temperance meeting in Richmond, Poe had sworn
a public oath never again to touch a drop of liquor, signing a document 
formally declaring his intentions which was then widely circulated in the
press.18 Mr. Kennedy, however, had received his information on Poe’s
“debauch” from a decidedly second-hand source, most likely his friend Dr.
Snodgrass. In fact, it appears that all of the most arduous contemporary
supporters of the alcohol-abuse theory, including R. H. Stoddard – who
claimed that Poe had gotten on the return train to Baltimore by mistake
while in a drunken stupor – and John R. Thompson, who declared, “He
died, indeed, from delirium from drunkenness,” all relayed information
they had received in recycled form.19
Dr. John Joseph Moran was a young resident at Washington College
Hospital who was Poe’s attending physician during the author’s four
days he spent there before dying on 7 October 1849. In a book which
Moran published at his own expense over thirty years later, A Defense
of Edgar Allan Poe, he wrote, “I have stated to you the fact that Edgar
Allan Poe did not die under the effect of an intoxicant, nor was the
smell of liquor upon his breath or person.”