RAPID DECAY OF THE HUMAN STRUCTURE.
Under this heading, we will present to our readers an essay upon the causes of the dissolution of the human body. The writer, Mr. W. W. Ball, of Bangor, Michigan, who published the following in The Casket of March, 1877, has kindly allowed us to republish it, for the benefit of those who have not read it, and also as a proof that the theories advanced in this volume cannot be refuted. We give the article at length. The statements advanced in the essay, also the course of treatment adopted in the preservation of bodies, will be found to possess great similarity with the different methods herein given.
By W. W. Ball.
As soon as the vital action ceases, decomposition ensues in the substances which were before the very elements of life, viz.: blood, lymph, chyme, chyle and gastric juice, become active agents in its destruction.
In the blood, the most important agent during life, as soon as life ceases it becomes one of the first to produce that blackened, putrid and sloughing condition we find shortly after death. The blood being
left in every part of the body, it breaks up and forms new compounds, of which only a general outline is attainable, for want of definite chemical analysis or microscopical observation. The fibrine and serum separate; the former, which contains most of the red corpuscles, albumen, saline and fatty substances, glutinates or coagulates on the sides of the vessels themselves, while the serum permeates the surrounding tissues, uniting with oxygen carried off from the pulmonary structure during life, and these, having an affinity for the tissues, form those compounds termed sulphuretted and carburetted hydrogen gases, giving rise to that effluvium which characterize deceased bodies.