 Exploring the elevated spirituality of the human body, transcendentalism was one of the main discourses during Poe's time due to speculations of immortality and questions on the post-human subject as a result of progress in medicine.It is suggested that during Poe's time, experiments that investigated death and life's limit were popular.The philosophical ideas encompassed by transcendentalism are implied in "Loss of Breath" with the narrator's reflection that he was "alive with the qualifications of the dead – dead with the propensities of the living".