[23]. Recueil Periodique de la Societé de Medicine de Paris. T. LXI. p. 87
[24]. Medico-Chirurg. Trans. vol. 1, p. 157. Analogous cases to those related by Mr. Chevalier will be found in Bonetus Sepulchr. Anat. vol. 1, p. 383; and Morgagni Epist. 48, Art. 44; see also a communication by Dr. Ozanam in the Recueil Periodique de la Societé de Medicine de Paris, tom. 61, p. 87.
[25]. A young animal may not so soon perish as an older one; and a strong and healthy individual may survive during a longer period than a creature that is in a state of debility. By filling the lungs with air a person may also be enabled to dispense with the act of respiration for a longer period; Mr. Kite made a very deep inspiration of 300 cubic inches, and was thus enabled to retain this quantity for 72 seconds, without a fresh inspiration; and divers in the pearl fisheries, inspire deeply before they descend. It has been, moreover, established by numerous experiments that the demand for oxygen in the lungs is materially influenced by the nature of the ingesta received into the stomach; Mr. Spalding, the celebrated diver, observed, that whenever he used a diet of animal food, or drank spirituous liquors, he consumed in a much shorter time the oxygen of the atmospheric air in his diving-bell; and therefore he had learned from experience to confine himself to a vegetable diet, and water, when following his avocation. And the priest, or conjurer (Pillal Karras, in the Malabar language) who attends the divers in the pearl fisheries of the east, enjoins, as a religious duty, an abstinence from all food, before he plunges into the ocean.
Muscular exertions, as in the act of struggling, will without doubt contribute to the expenditure of oxygen, and increase the demand for it, and therefore in its absence such movement must accelerate death by suffocation; this physiological fact will be hereafter more fully elucidated.
[26]. We anticipate the objections that will be urged against the truth of this assertion. It will be asked how it can be reconciled with the accounts of persons who have recovered after an asphyxia of a much longer duration? It may be inquired how the statement can be reconciled with the ordinary histories of divers, who have become so expert in the art which they profess, as to be capable of remaining beneath the water for twenty minutes, or even for a longer period: we are bound to consider such statements as no better than extravagant fables; not more authentic, says Mr. Brodie (Manuscript Notes), but certainly less poetical and elegant, than those of the nymphs and mermaids, whose ordinary residence is in grottos beneath the waves of the sea; or than those Arabian fictions which have amused and astonished our youthful imaginations with the description of the Princes who govern the submarine nations, and pass their lives in palaces of crystal at the bottom of the ocean—but of this we shall speak more fully hereafter.
[27]. Although the term Asphyxia merely signifies the absence of the pulse, yet the name is erroneously applied to every apparent loss of vitality.
[28]. De Haen thought that death was produced in drowning by the water flowing into the lungs, and thus stopping the passage of the blood in the arteries. This belief gave origin to the very erroneous and mischievous practice, which still continues amongst the more ignorant, of suspending drowned persons by the heels, or of rolling them over barrels.
[29]. Mr. Coleman examined the lungs of a cat which had been drowned, by placing a ligature on the trachea, removing the lungs from the thorax, and then making an opening in the trachea under water, so as to collect the air which issued from the orifice; the whole quantity of air thus obtained, amounted only to half a drachm; yet the same lungs when inflated, required as much as two ounces of air, by measure, for their distention. Nor would the presence of water appear to be immediately fatal, when introduced into the lungs; Dr. Goodwyn poured two ounces of water into the lungs of a cat, through an opening made between the cartilages of the trachea; the animal had an immediate difficulty of breathing, and a feeble pulse, but lived several hours afterwards without much apparent inconvenience; it was at length strangled, and the water was found in the lungs. From which it would appear, that the admission of a certain portion of water, does not tend to hasten death. The author of this note was present at an experiment made by Mr. Brodie, in which he drowned a guinea pig, whose trachea had been previously perforated; so that in this case, no spasm of the glottis could arrest the ingress of the water into the pulmonary air cells; but this produced no modification of the usual symptoms; nor did it prevent the resuscitation of the animal, which was afterwards effected by the appropriate methods.
[30]. An animal also dies sooner by drowning, than by simple strangulation; Mr. Brodie considers that the abstraction of heat in the former case is quite sufficient to account for this difference.
[31]. Foderè, 90.