IV
It is well-known that fear may result in sudden death. Bichat maintained that it was essentially paralysis of the heart which causes death in strong emotions. 'The forces of the circulatory system,’ he says, 'are worked up to such a pitch that they cannot recover from the sudden exhaustion, and death ensues.’
Old people in particular are liable to succumb to strong mental emotions. This fact stands in apparent contradiction to that of their sensibility, which is generally much less acute than in youth, but it is the weakness of their nervous system which destroys the balance. Often after great catastrophes parents succumb in consequence of the death of their children, while the brothers and sisters offer more resistance to grief.
Marcello Donato and Paolo Giovio relate that at the siege of Buda, in the war against the Turks, there was a youth whose valour excited the admiration of all. Unhappily he fell a victim to the repeated attacks of the besiegers. When the battle was over, the leaders hastened to learn who the hero was. Scarcely had the visor been taken from his face than Raischach of Swabia recognised his son. He stood motionless, his eyes fixed upon his son, then fell dead to the ground without uttering a word.
As a proof that weakness more easily causes death in emotion, I here mention an experiment of Johannes Müller. He destroyed the liver of some frogs, thus rendering them very weak and excitable. The slightest stimuli produced contractions in them, but they did not move if left in peace, and even lived for a long time. Those he took into his hand were immediately attacked by tetanus and died in a few seconds.
Haller tells of a man who, in stepping over a grave, imagined himself seized by the foot, and died the same day; others have died from fear on the day predicted as the day of their death, and some have fallen down dead at the moment they were condemned to death. Haller had already noticed that fear could arrest the action of the heart and profoundly modify the circulation of the blood: hæmorrhagias supprimit, et menses, et lac, viresque ad venerem necessarias frangit.
Surgeons well know how fatal a violent shock to the nervous system from traumatic or moral causes may prove to their patients. In such cases the medulla oblongata is so depressed in its activity that chloroformisation is sufficient to arrest the action of the heart and respiration. Porta, the great surgeon of the University of Pavia, when his patients died under an operation, used to throw his knife and instruments contemptuously to the ground, and shout in a tone of reproach to the corpse: 'Cowards die from fear.’
My friend Lauder Brunton, professor of medicine at the hospital of Saint Bartholomew, in London, published the following fact a few years ago.[33] An assistant had made himself odious to the students of a certain college; a body of them, therefore, resolved to give him a fright. They put ready a block and an axe in a dark room, then seized the man and led him before a few students dressed in black, who officiated as judges. When he saw these preparations he took it for a joke, but the students assured him that all was meant in earnest, and that he must prepare for death, for he should presently be beheaded. They bound his eyes, forced him to his knees, and bent his head on the block. While one of them made a noise by brandishing the axe, as though to strike the fatal blow, another struck his neck with a wet towel.
When they took the bandage from his eyes he was dead!