The researches of Dr. Bennett Dowler, of New Orleans, have presented us with results profoundly impressive, startling, and instructive. He has, with almost unequalled zeal, availed himself of opportunities of performing autopsy at a period following death of unprecedented promptness, that is, within a few minutes after the last struggle, and employed them with an intelligent curiosity and to admirable purpose.
I have said that, in physiological death, the natural decay of advancing age, there is a gradual encroachment of death upon life; so here, in premature death from violent diseases, the contrasted analogy is offered of life maintaining its ground far amidst the destructive changes of death. Thus, in cholera asphyxia, the body, for an indefinite period after all other signs of life have ceased, is agitated by horrid spasms, and violently contorted. We learn from Dr. Dowler that it is not only in these frightful manifestations, and in the cold stiffness of the familiar rigor mortis, that we are to trace this tenacious muscular contraction as the last vital sign, but that in all, or almost all cases we shall find it lingering, not in the heart, anciently considered in its right ventricle the ultimum moriens, nor in any other internal fibres, but in the muscles of the limbs, the biceps most obstinately. This muscle will contract, even after the arm with the scapula has been torn from the trunk, upon receiving a sharp blow, so as to raise the forearm from the table, to a right angle with the upper arm.
We also learn from him the curious fact that the generation of animal heat, which physiologists have chosen to point out as a function most purely vital, does not cease upon the supervention of obvious or apparent death. There is, he tells us, a steady development for some time of what he terms “post-mortem caloricity,” by which the heat is carried not only above the natural or normal standard, but to a height rarely equalled in the most sthenic or inflammatory forms of disease. He has seen it reach 113° of Fahr., higher than Hunter ever met with it, in his experiments made for the purpose of exciting it; higher than it has been noted even in scarlatina, 112°, I think, being the ultimate limit observed in that disease of pungent external heat; and far beyond the natural heat of the central parts of the healthy body, which is 97° or 98°. Nor is it near the centre, or at the trunk, that the post-mortem warmth is greatest, but, for some unknown reason, at the inner part of the thigh, about the lower margin of its upper third. I scarcely know any fact in nature more incomprehensible or inexplicable than this. We were surprised when it was first told us that, in the Asiatic pestilence, the body of the livid victim was often colder before than after death; but this, I think, is easily understood. The profluvia of cholera, and its profound capillary stagnation, concur in carrying off all the heat generated, and in preventing or impeding the development of animal heat. No vital actions, no changes necessary to the production of caloric, can proceed without the minute circulation which has been checked by the asphyxiated condition of the subject, while the fluids leave the body through every outlet, and evaporation chills the whole exposed and relaxed surface. Yet the lingering influence of a scarcely perceptible vitality prevents the purely chemical changes of putrefactive decomposition, which commence instantly upon the extinction of this feeble resistance, and caloric is evolved by the processes of ordinary delay.
In the admirable liturgy of the churches of England and of Rome, there is a fervent prayer for protection against “battle, murder, and sudden death.” From death uncontemplated, unarranged, unprepared for, may Heaven in mercy deliver us! But if ever ready, as we should be for the inevitable event, the most kindly mode of infliction must surely be that which is most prompt and brief. To die unconsciously, as in sleep, or by apoplexy, or lightning, or overwhelming violence, as in the catastrophe of the Princeton, this is the true Euthanasia. “Cæsar,” says Suetonius, “finem vitæ commodissimum, repentinum inopinatumque pretulerat.” Montaigne, who quotes this, renders it, “La moins préméditée et la plus courte.” “Mortes repentinæ,” reasons Pliny, “hoc est summa vitæ felicitas.” “Emori nolo,” exclaims Cicero, “sed me esse mortuum nihil estimo.”
Sufferers by various modes of execution were often, in the good old times of our merciless ancestors, denied as long as possible the privilege of dying, and the Indians of our continent utter a fiendish howl of disappointment when a victim thus prematurely escapes from their ingenious malignity. The coup de grace was a boon unspeakably desired by the poor wretch broken on the wheel, or stretched upon the accursed cross, and forced to linger on with mangled and bleeding limbs, amidst all the cruel torments of thirst and fever, through hours and even days that must have seemed interminable.
The progress of civilization, and a more enlightened humanity have put an end to all these atrocities, and substituted the gallows, the garrote, and the guillotine, which inflict deaths so sudden that many have questioned whether they necessarily imply any consciousness of physical suffering. These are, however, by no means the most instantaneous modes of putting an end to life and its manifestations. In the hanged, as in the drowned, and otherwise suffocated, there is a period of uncertainty, during which the subject is, as we know, recoverable; we dare not pronounce him insensible. He who has seen an ox “pithed” in the slaughter-house, or a game-cock in all the flush and excitement of battle “gaffed” in the occiput or back of the neck, will contrast the immediate stiffness and relaxation of the flaccid body with the prolonged and convulsive struggles of the decapitated bird, with a sort of curious anxiety to know how long and in what degree sensibility may linger in the head and in the trunk when severed by the sharp axe. The history of the guillotine offers many incidents calculated to throw a doubt on the subject, and the inquiries of Seguret and Sue seem to prove the existence of post-mortem passion and emotion.
Among the promptest modes of extinguishing life is the electric fluid. A flash of lightning will destroy the coagulability of the blood, as well as the contractility of the muscular fibre; the dead body remaining flexible. A blow on the epigastrium kills instantly with the same results. Soldiers fall sometimes in battle without a wound; the impulse of a cannon-ball passing near the pit of the stomach is here supposed to be the cause of death. The effect in these two last instances is ascribed by some to “a shock given to the semilunar ganglion, and the communication of the impression to the heart;” but this is insufficient to account either for the quickness of the occurrence, or the peculiar changes impressed upon the solids and fluids. Others are of opinion that the whole set of respiratory nerves is paralyzed through the violent shock given to the phrenic, “thus shutting up,” as one writer expresses it, “the fountain of all the sympathetic actions of the system.” This hypothesis is liable also to the objections urged above; and we must acknowledge the suddenness and character of the results described to be as yet unexplained, and in the present state of our knowledge inexplicable.
On the field of battle, it has been observed that the countenances of those killed by gun-shot wounds are usually placid, while those who perish by the sword, bayonet, pike, or lance, offer visages distorted by pain, or by emotions of anger or impatience. Poisons differ much among themselves as to the amount and kind of suffering they occasion. We know of none which are absolutely free from the risk of inflicting severe distress. Prussic acid gives perhaps the briefest death which we have occasion to observe. I have seen it, as Taylor states, kill an animal, when applied to the tongue or the eye, almost before the hand which offered it could be removed. Yet in the case of Tawell, tried for the murder of Sarah Hart, by this means, there was abundant testimony that many, on taking it, had time to utter a loud and peculiar scream of anguish: and in a successful attempt at suicide made by a physician of New York city, we have a history of appalling suffering and violent convulsion. So I have seen in suicide with opium, which generally gives an easy and soporose death resembling that of apoplexy, one or two instances in which there were very great and long-protracted pain and sickness.
Medical writers have agreed, very generally, that “the death-struggle,” “the agony of death,” as it has long been termed is not what it appears, a stage of suffering. I am not satisfied—I say it reluctantly—I am not satisfied with these consolatory views, so ingeniously and plausibly advocated by Wilson Philip, and Symonds, Hufeland and Hoffman. I would they were true! But all the symptoms look like tokens or expressions of distress; we may hope that they are not always such in reality: but how can this be proved? Those who, having seemed to die, recovered afterward and declared that they had undergone no pain, do not convince me of the fact any more than the somnambulist, who upon awaking, assures me that he has not dreamed at all, after a whole night of action, and connected thought and effected purpose. His memory retains no traces of the questionable past; like that of the epileptic, who forgets the whole train of events, and is astonished after a horrible fit to find his tongue bitten, and his face and limbs bruised and swollen.
Nay, some have proceeded to the paradoxical extreme of suggesting that certain modes of death are attended with pleasurable sensations, as for instance, hanging; and a late reviewer, who regards this sombre topic with a most cheerful eye, gives us instances which he considers in point. I have seen many men hung, forty at least, a strangely large number. In all, there were evidences of suffering, as far as could be judged by external appearances. It once happened that a certain set were slowly executed, owing to a maladroit arrangement of the scaffold upon which they stood, which gave way only at one end. The struggles of such as were half supported were dreadful, and those of them who could speak earnestly begged that their agonies should be put an end to.