Chapter XXIII: Section XV (3)

The Hadj Abdallah Ibn Ali’s next dispatch contained much important tidings concerning a twenty years’ truce to be concluded between the King Boabdil, of Granada, and the King Ferdinand, of Spain—and much graver gossip of the noble Conde of Alarcos, Ferdinand’s ambassador; of his high feats of arms, and gentle feats of courtesy—of how all the court admired him, and how the Lady Ayesha shunned him, and how she was less frequent at the falconry, less frequent at the chase, less frequent at the festival, less frequent at the royal banquets—and how her hand-maidens reported that their mistress sighed all the time and often wept, and sat long hours gazing upon nothing, and played no more upon her lute, nor sung the songs of Islam—and how she was—he feared—ill at ease, and pining for her native land.

And when Muley Abderrahman read the letter he shook his head, and muttered—

“Ay, she loves now, but it is the wrong one—a Nazarene, a dog,” and he tore his beard and wept. That night a royal courier rode hard from Mequiñez to Saleè, and the next day a fleet galley scoured the way across the narrow seas to the fair shores of Granada.

The embassy should return at once to Mequiñez. Now hour of delay—too late.

The embassy had returned the preceding day, but it was the Spanish embassy: and it had returned, not to Mequiñez, but to Cordova. And ere his master’s mandate had stricken terror to the soul of the Hadj Abdallah, the Spanish bells were chiming for the wedding of a Moorish maiden, now a Christian bride; and the Leila Ayesha, of Mequiñez, was the wife of the noble Conde De Alarcos: nor have I ever heard that she rued either of the changes.

Again Muley Abderrahman tore his beard, and this time from the very roots. But his wonted philosophy still consoled him, and after a little while he muttered—

“Allah, assist me, that I thought myself so wise—yet know not the heart of a woman! How should I?”

* * * * *

WRITE THOU UPON LIFE’S PAGE.

BY GRENVILLE GREY.

Leave thou some light behind thee,
Some mark upon thine age;
Let not a false fate bind thee—
Write thou upon life’s page,

Some word of earnest meaning,
Some thought, or else some deed,
On which thy brother leaning,
Unto better may succeed.

For none may tell what beauty,
What endless good there lies,
In some little nameless duty,
Whose remembrance never dies.

Leave thou some light behind thee,
Some token of thy way;
Let not a false ease bind thee—
Thou art not wholly clay.

There is something noble in thee,
Let it speak and not be mute;
There is something that should win thee
From a kindred with the brute.

Thou art not, oh! my brother,
Wholly impotent for good;
Thou may’st win or warn another
From the wrongs thou hast withstood.

Leave thou some trace behind thee—
In life’s warfare, go, engage;
Let no more a false fate bind thee—
Write thou upon life’s page.

* * * * *

LINES ON A VASE OF FLOWERS,

(FOUND UPON MY DESK.)

BY ESTELLE ANNA LEWIS.

I came upon these simple flowers
As something I revere;
They grew in Love’s enchanted bowers—
And love hath placed them here.

I kiss their cheeks of virgin bloom,
I press their dewy lips,
While my wrapt soul of their perfume,
Inebriated sips.

I look into their violet eyes,
And feel my heart grow calm,
And fancy I’m in Paradise,
Inhaling Eden’s balm.

There in ecstatic dreams I rove
Among celestial bowers,
Weaving a garland for my Love,
Of beatific flowers.

* * * * *

DEATH.[7]

BY SAMUEL HENRY DICKSON, M. D.; PROFESSOR IN THE MEDICAL COLLEGE OF SOUTH
CAROLINA.

As the word Life is employed in a double sense to denote the actions or phenomena by which it is developed, and the cause of these phenomena, so the old English word Death is used familiarly to express two or more meanings. The first of these is the transition from the living to the lifeless or inanimate state—the act, that is, of dying; the second, the condition of an organized body which has ceased to live, while organization yet remains, and symmetry still displays itself, and the admirable structure of its parts is not yet destroyed by decomposition, or resolved into the original and primary elements from which it was moulded,

“Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers.”

We occasionally speak of “dead matter” in the sense of inorganic; but this is merely a rhetorical or metaphorical phrase. That which has never lived cannot properly be said to be dead.

In the following essay, I shall use the word chiefly in the first of the senses above indicated. It will often be convenient to employ it in the second also; but in doing so, I will be careful so to designate its bearing as to avoid any confusion. The context will always prevent any misunderstanding on this point.

Death may be considered physiologically, pathologically, and psychologically. We are obliged to regard it and speak of it as the uniform correlative, and indeed the necessary consequence, or final result of life; the act of dying as the rounding off, or termination of the act of living. But it ought to be remarked that this conclusion is derived, not from any understanding or comprehension of the relevancy of the asserted connection, nor from any _à priori_ reasoning applicable to the inquiry, but merely _à posteriori_ as the result of universal experience. All that has lived has died; and, therefore, all that lives must die.

The solid rock on which we tread, and with which we rear our palaces and temples, what is it often when microscopically examined, but a congeries of the fossil remains of innumerable animal tribes! The soil from which, by tillage, we derive our vegetable food, is scarcely any thing more than a mere mixture of the decayed and decaying fragments of former organic being; the shells and exuviæ, the skeletons and fibres and exsiccated juices of extinct life.

The earth itself, in its whole habitable surface, is little else than the mighty sepulchre of the past; and

“All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning, and the Barcan desert pierce,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings—yet, the dead are there;
And millions in these solitudes, since first
The flight of years begun, have laid them down
In their last sleep: the dead reign there alone.”

Four millions of Egyptians cultivate the valley of the great river on whose banks, amidst the fertilizing dust of myriads of their progenitors, there are calculated still to exist, in a state of preservation, not less than from four hundred to five hundred millions of mummies. The “City of the Tombs” is far more populous than the neighboring streets even of crowded Constantinople; and the cemeteries of London and the catacombs of Paris are filled to overflowing. The trees which gave shade to our predecessors of a few generations back lie prostrate; and the dog and horse, the playmate and the servant of our childhood, are but dust. Death surrounds and sustains us. We derive our nourishment from the destruction of living organisms, and from this source alone.

And who is there among us that has reached the middle term of existence, that may not, in the touching phrase of Carlyle, “measure the various stages of his life-journey by the white tombs of his beloved ones, rising in the distance like pale, mournfully receding milestones?”

“When Wilkie was in the Escurial,” says Southey, “looking at Titian’s famous picture of the Last Supper in the refectory there, an old Jeronymite monk said to him, ‘I have sat daily in sight of that picture for now nearly threescore years; during that time my companions have dropped off one after another—all who were my seniors, all who were my cotemporaries, and many or most of those who were younger than myself; more than one generation has passed away, and there the figures in the picture have remained unchanged. I look at them, till I sometimes think that _they_ are the realities, and we but shadows.’”

I have stated that there is no reason known to us why Death should always “round the sum of life.” Up to a certain point of their duration, varying in each separate set of instances, and in the comparison of extremes varying prodigiously, the vegetable and animal organisms not only sustain themselves, but expand and develop themselves, grow and increase, enjoying a better and better life, advancing and progressive. Wherefore is it that at this period all progress is completely arrested; that thenceforward they waste, deteriorate and fail? Why should they thus decline and decay with unerring uniformity upon their attaining their highest perfection, their most intense activity? This ultimate law is equally mysterious and inexorable. It is true the Sacred Writings tell us of Enoch, “whom God took and he was not;” and of Elijah, who was transported through the upper air in a chariot of fire; and of Melchisedek, the most extraordinary personage whose name is recorded, “without father, without mother, without descent: having neither beginning of days, nor end of life.” We read the history without conceiving the faintest hope from these exceptions to the universal rule. Yet our fancy has always exulted in visionary evasions of it, by forging for ourselves creations of immortal maturity, youth and beauty, residing in Elysian fields of unfading spring, amidst the fruition of perpetual vigor. We would drink, in imagination, of the sparkling fountain of rejuvenescence; nay, boldly dare the terror of Medea’s caldron. We echo, in every despairing heart, the ejaculation of the expiring Wolcott, “Bring back my youth!”

Reflection, however, cannot fail to reconcile us to our ruthless destiny. There is another law of our being, not less unrelenting, whose yoke is even harsher and more intolerable, from whose pressure Death alone can relieve us, and in comparison with which the absolute certainty of dying becomes a glorious blessing. Of whatever else we may remain ignorant, each of us, for himself, comes to feel, realize and know unequivocally that all his capacities, both of action and enjoyment, are transient and tend to pass away; and when our thirst is satiated, we turn disgusted from the bitter lees of the once fragrant and sparkling cup. I am aware of Parnell’s offered analogy—

“The tree of deepest root is found
Unwilling most to leave the ground;”

and of Rush’s notion, who imputes to the aged such an augmenting love of life that he is at a loss to account for it, and suggests, quaintly enough, that it may depend upon custom, the great moulder of our desires and propensities; and that the infirm and decrepit “love to live on because they have acquired a habit of living.” His assumption is wrong in point of fact. He loses sight of the important principle that Old Age is a relative term, and that one man may be more superannuated, farther advanced in natural decay at sixty, than another at one hundred years. Parr might well rejoice at being alive, and exult in the prospect of continuing to live, at one hundred and thirty, being capable, as is affirmed, even of the enjoyment of sexual life at that age; but he who has had his “three sufficient warnings,” who is deaf, lame and blind; who, like the monk of the Escurial, has lost all his cotemporaries, and is condemned to hopeless solitude, and oppressed with the consciousness of dependence and imbecility, must look on Death not as a curse, but a refuge. Of one hundred and thirty-three suicides occurring in Geneva from 1825 to 1834, more than half were above fifty years of age; thirty-four, from fifty to sixty; nineteen, from sixty to seventy; nine, from seventy to eighty; three, from eighty to ninety; in all sixty-five. The mean term of life in that city being about thirty-five to forty, this bears an immense proportion to the actual population above fifty, and exhibits forcibly an opposite condition of feeling to that alleged by Rush, a weariness of living, a desire to die, rather than an anxiety, or even willingness to live.

I once knew an old man of about one hundred and four who retained many of his faculties. He could read ordinary print without glasses, walked firmly, rode well, and could even leap with some agility. When I last parted with him, I wished him twenty years more; upon which he grasped my hand closely, and declared he would not let me go until I had retracted or reversed the prayer.

Strolling with my venerable and esteemed colleague, Prof. Stephen Elliott, one afternoon, through a field on the banks of the river Ashley, we came upon a negro basking in the sun, the most ancient-looking personage I have ever seen. Our attempts, with his aid, to calculate his age, were of course conjectural; but we were satisfied that he was far above one hundred. Bald, toothless, nearly blind, bent almost horizontally, and scarcely capable of locomotion, he was absolutely alone in the world, living by permission upon a place, from which the generation to which his master and fellow-servants belonged had long since disappeared. He expressed many an earnest wish for death, and declared, emphatically, that he “was afraid God Almighty had forgotten him.”

We cannot wonder, then, that the ancients should believe, “Whom the gods love, die young,” and are ready to say with Southey, himself, subsequently, like poor Swift, a melancholy example of the truth of his poetical exclamation,

“They who reach
Gray hairs die piecemeal.”

Sacred history informs us that, in the infancy of the world, the physiological tendency to death was far less urgently and early developed than it is now. When the change took place is not stated; if it occurred gradually, the downward progress has been long since arrested. All records make the journey of life from the time of Job and the early patriarchs, much the same as the pilgrim of to-day is destined to travel. Threescore and ten was, when Cheops built his pyramid, as it is now, a long life. Legends, antique and modern, do indeed tell us of tribes that, like Riley’s Arabs and the serfs of Middle Russia, and the Ashantees and other Africans, live two or three centuries, but these are travelers’ stories, unconfirmed. The various statistical tables that have been in modern times made up from materials more or less authentic, and the several inquiries into the general subject of longevity, seem to lead to the gratifying conclusion that there is rather an increase of the average or mean duration of civilized life. In 1806, Duvillard fixed the average duration of life in France at twenty-eight years; in 1846, Bousquet estimates it at thirty-three. Mallet calculated that the average life of the Genevese had extended ten years in three generations. In Farr’s fifth report (for 1844), the “probable duration,” the “expectation of life” in England, is placed above forty; a great improvement within half a century. It is curious, if it be true, that the extreme term seems to lessen as the average thus increases. Mallet is led to this opinion from the fact, among others, that in Geneva, coincident with the generally favorable change above mentioned, there has not been a single centenarian within twenty-seven years; such instances of longevity having been formerly no rarer there than elsewhere.

Birds and fishes are said to be the longest lived of animals. For the longevity of the latter, ascertained in fish-ponds, Bacon gives the whimsical reason that, in the moist element which surrounds them, they are protected from exsiccation of the vital juices, and thus preserved. This idea corresponds very well with the stories told of the uncalculated ages of some of the inhabitants of the bayous of Louisiana, and of the happy ignorance of that region, where a traveler once found a withered and antique corpse—so goes the tale—sitting propped in an arm-chair among his posterity, who could not comprehend why he _slept_ so long and so soundly.

But the Hollanders and Burmese do not live especially long; and the Arab, always lean and wiry, leads a protracted life amidst his arid sands. Nor can we thus account for the lengthened age of the crow, the raven, and the eagle, which are affirmed to hold out for two or three centuries.

There is the same difference among shrubs and trees, of which some are annual, some of still more brief existence, and some almost eternal. The venerable oak bids defiance to the storms of a thousand winters; and the Indian baobab is set down as a contemporary at least of the Tower of Babel, having probably braved, like the more transient, though long-enduring olive, the very waters of the great deluge.

It will be delightful to know—will Science ever discover for us?—what constitutes the difference thus impressed upon the long and short-lived races of the organized creation. Why must the fragrant shrub or gorgeous flower-plant die immediately after performing its function of continuing the species, and the pretty ephemeron languish into non-existence just as it flutters through its genial hour of love, and grace, and enjoyment; while the banyan, and the chestnut, the tortoise, the vulture, and the carp, formed of the same primary material elements, and subsisting upon the very same resources of nutrition and supply, outlast them so indefinitely?

Death from old age, from natural decay—usually spoken of as death without disease—is most improperly termed by writers an euthanasia. Alas! how far otherwise is the truth! Old age itself is, with the rarest exceptions, exceptions which I have never had the good fortune to meet with anywhere—old age itself is a protracted and terrible disease.

During its whole progress, Death is making gradual encroachments upon the domain of life. Function after function undergoes impairment, and is less and less perfectly carried on, while organ after organ suffers atrophy and other changes, unfitting it for the performance of offices to which it was originally designed. I will not go over the gloomy detail of the observed modifications occurring in every part of the frame, now a noble ruin, majestic even in decay. The lungs admit and vivify less blood; the heart often diminishes in size and always acts more slowly, and the arteries frequently ossify; nutrition is impeded and assimilation deteriorated; senile marasmus follows, “and the seventh age falls into the lean and slippered pantaloon;” and, last and worst of all, the brain and indeed the whole nervous tissue shrink in size and weight, undergoing at the same time more or less change of structure and composition. As the skull cannot contract on its contents, the shrinking of the brain occasions a great increase of the fluid within the subarachnoid space. Communication with the outer world, now about to be cut off entirely, becomes limited and less intimate. The eyes grow dim; the ear loses its aptitude for harmony, and soon ceases to appreciate sound; odors yield no fragrance; flavors affect not the indifferent palate; and even the touch appreciates only harsh and coarse impressions. The locomotive power is lost; the capillaries refuse to circulate the dark, thick blood; the extremities retain no longer their vital warmth; the breathing slow and oppressed, more and more difficult, at last terminates forever with a deep expiration. This tedious process is rarely accomplished in the manner indicated without interruption; it is usually, nay, as far as my experience has gone, always brought to an abrupt close by the supervention of some positive malady. In our climate, this is, in the larger proportion, an affection of the respiratory apparatus, bronchitis, or pulmonitis. It will, of course, vary with the original or constitutional predisposition of the individual, and somewhat in relation to locality and season. Many aged persons die of apoplexy and its kindred cerebral maladies, not a few of diarrhœa; a winter epidemic of influenza is apt to be fatal to them in large numbers everywhere.

When we regard death pathologically, that is, as the result of violence and destructive disease, it is evident that the phenomena presented will vary relatively to the contingencies effective in producing it. It is obviously out of place here to recount them, forming as they do a vast collection of instructive facts, the basis indeed of an almost separate science, Morbid Anatomy.

There are many of the phenomena of death, however, that are common to all forms and modes of death, or are rarely wanting; these are highly interesting objects of study in themselves, and assume a still greater importance when we consider them in the light of signs or tokens of the extinction of life. It seems strange that it has been found difficult to agree upon any such signs short of molecular change or putrefactive decomposition, that shall be pronounced absolutely certain, and calculated entirely to relieve us from the horrible chance of premature interment of a body yet living. The flaccidity of the cornea is dwelt on by some; others trust rather to the _rigor mortis_, the rigid stiffness of the limbs and trunk supervening upon the cold relaxation which attends generally the last moments. This rigidity is not understood or explained satisfactorily. It is possible that, as Matteucci has proved, the changes in all the tissues, chiefly chemical or chemico-vital, are the source from whence is generated the “nervous force” during life; so, after death, the similar changes, now purely chemical, may, for a brief period, continue to generate the same or a similar force, which is destined to expend itself simply upon the muscular fibres in disposing them to contract. There is a vague analogy here with the effect of galvanism upon bodies recently dead, which derives some little force from the fact that the bodies least disposed to respond to the stimulus of galvanism are those which form the exceptions to the almost universal exhibition of rigidity—those, namely, which have been killed by lightning, and by blows on the pit of the stomach. Some poisons, too, leave the corpse quite flaccid and flexible.

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.

In former, nay, even in recent times, we are told that pirates and robbers have resorted to half-hanging, to extort confession as to hidden treasure. Is it possible that they can have so much mistaken the means they employ as thus to use pleasurable appliances for the purposes of torture?

The mistake of most reasoners on the subject, Winslow and Hufeland more especially, consists in this, that they fix their attention exclusively upon the final moments of dissolution. But the act of dying may be in disease, as we know it to be in many modes of violence, impalement, for example, or crucifixion, very variously protracted and progressive. “Insensibly as we enter life,” says Hufeland, “equally insensibly do we leave it. Man can have no sensation of dying.” Here the insensibility of _death completed_, that is, of _the dead body_, is strangely predicated of the moribund while still living. This transitive condition, to use the graphic language of the Southern writer whom we have already more than once quoted, is “a terra incognita, where vitality, extinguished in some tissues, smouldering in others, and disappearing gradually from all, resembles the region of a volcano, whose eruptions subsiding, leave the surface covered with cinders and ashes, concealing the rents and lesions which have on all sides scarred and disfigured the face of nature.”

Besides this, we have no right to assume, as Hufeland has here done, the insensibility of the child at birth. It is subject to disease before birth; as soon as it draws a breath, it utters loud cries and sobs. To pronounce all its actions “mechanical, instinctive, necessary, automatic,” in fact, is a very easy solution of the question; but I think neither rational nor conclusive. If you prick it or burn it, you regard its cries as proving sensibility to pain; but on the application of air to its delicate and hitherto protected skin, and the distension of its hitherto quiet lung, the same cry, you say, is mechanical and inexpressive. So Leibnitz explained, to his own satisfaction, the struggles and moans of the lower animals as automatic, being embarrassed with metaphysical and moral difficulties on the score of their intelligence and liability to suffering. But no one now espouses his theory, and we must accept, whether we can explain them or not, the facts that the lower animals are liable to pain during their entire existence, and that the heritage of their master is, from and during birth to the last moment of languishing vitality, a sad legacy of wo and suffering.

Unhappily we may appeal, in this discussion, directly to the evidence of our senses, to universal experience and observation. Who can doubt the tortures inflicted in tetanus? to alleviate which, indeed, I have more than once been solicited for poison. Does not every one know the grievous inflictions of cancer, lasting through months and years, and continuing, as I have myself seen, within a short hour of the absolute extinction of life, in spite of every effort to relieve it? The most painful of deaths apparently is that which closes the frightful tragedy of hydrophobia, and patients, to hurry it, often ask most urgently for any means of prompt destruction. But these more intense and acute pangs are not the only form of intolerable agony. Unquenchable thirst, a dreadfully progressive suffocation, confusion of the senses and of thought—these are inflictions that nature shudderingly recoils from, and these, or their manifestations, are scarcely ever wanting on the death-bed.

If any one should ask why I thus endeavor to prove what it is revolting to us all to believe or admit, I answer—first, that truth is always desirable to be known both for its own sake and because it is ever pregnant with ultimate benefit and utility. More than one moribund has expressed to me his surprise and horror—shall I say disappointment too? at finding the dark valley of the shadow of death so rough and gloomy and full of terrors. Is it not better that we should be as thoroughly and adequately prepared for the stern reality as may be, and that we should summon up all the patience and fortitude requisite to bear us through? When the last moment is actually at hand, we can safely assure our friends that they will soon reach a state of rest and unconsciousness, and that meanwhile, as they die more and more, they will less and less feel the pain of dying. Secondly, by appreciating properly the nature and amount of the pangs of death, we shall be led to a due estimate of the demand for their relief or palliation, and of the obligation incumbent on us to institute every proper effort for that purpose with zeal and assiduity. He who believes with Hufeland, that the moribund is insensible, is likely to do little to solace or comfort him.

There are doubtless instances of death entirely easy. “I wish,” said Doctor Black, “I could hold a pen; I would write how pleasant a thing it is to die.” Dr. George Fordyce desired his youngest daughter to read to him. When she had been reading some time, he called to her—“Stop; go out of the room; I am going to die.” She left him, and an attendant, entering immediately, found him dead. “Is it possible I am dying?” exclaimed a lady patient of mine; “I feel as if going into a sweet sleep.” “I am drowsy, had I better indulge myself?” asked Capt. G. On my giving him an affirmative answer, he turned, and sank into a slumber from which he awoke no more. It is indeed pleasant to know that examples occur of this unconscious and painless dissolution; but I fear they are comparatively rare exceptions to a natural rule; and I regard it as the duty of the medical profession to add to the number by the judicious employment of every means in our power.

And this leads me to a brief consideration of the question so often pressed upon us in one shape or another by the friends of our patients, and sometimes by our patients themselves: If the tendency of any medicinal or palliative agent be to shorten life, while it assuages pain, has the physician a right to resort to it? Even in the latter stages of some inflammatory affections, loss of blood, especially if carried to fainting, will arrest the sharp pangs, but the patient will probably die somewhat sooner: shall we bleed him? Large doses of opium will tranquilize him, or render him insensible; but he will probably sink somewhat earlier into the stupor of death. Shall we administer it, or shall we let him linger on in pain, merely that he may linger? Chloroform, ether, and other anæsthetics in full dose inspired render us insensible to all forms of anguish, and make death as easy, to use the phrase of Hufeland, as being born! Shall we allow our agonized moribund to inhale them? Used in less amount, a degree of relief and palliation is procured, but at the risk of exhausting or prostrating more promptly the failing energies of the system. Shall we avail ourselves of their anæsthetic influences, or are they forbidden us, either absolutely or partially?

These are by some moralists considered very delicate questions in ethics. Desgenettes has been highly applauded for the reply he made to Bonaparte’s suggestion, that it would be better for the miserable sick left by the French army at Jaffa to be drugged with opium: “It is my business to save life, not to destroy it.” But, in approving the physician, we must not harshly condemn the commanding officer. When we reflect on the condition of the men whom the fortune of war compelled him to abandon, and the certainty of a horrible death to each victim from wasting disease or Turkish cruelty, a rational philanthropist might well desire to smooth their passage to the grave.

During the employment of torture for the purposes of tyranny in Church and State, a physician or surgeon was at hand, whose whole duty it was to suspend the process whenever it became probable that nature would yield under its pressure, and the victim would escape through the opening, glad gates of death. It was then esteemed an act of mercy to give, or permit to be given by the executioner, a fatal blow, hence called emphatically and justly the _coup de grace_. In the terrible history of the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, we shudder to read that, after their expulsion from Moscow, the French soldiers, in repassing the fields of battles fought days and even weeks previously, found many of their comrades, there wounded and left, still dragging out a wretched and hopeless existence, amidst the corpses of those more fortunately slain outright, and perishing miserably and slowly of cold and hunger, and festering and gangrenous wounds. One need not surely offer a single argument to prove, all must feel and admit that the kindest office of humanity, under the circumstances, would have been to put an end to this indescribable mass of protracted wretchedness by the promptest means that could be used to extinguish so horrible a life.

A common case presents itself from time to time to every practitioner, in which all hope is avowedly extinct, and yet, in consonance with uniform custom, stimulants are assiduously prescribed to prolong existence in the midst of convulsive and delirious throes, not to be looked on without dismay. In some such contingencies, where the ultimate result was palpably certain, I have seen them at last abandoned as useless and worse, in order that nature, irritated and excited, lashed into factitious and transitory energy, might sink into repose; and have felt a melancholy satisfaction in witnessing the tranquillity, so soft and gentle, that soon ensued; the stormy agitation subsiding into a calm and peaceful decay.

Responsibility of the kind I am contemplating, often indeed more obvious and definite, presses upon the obstetrician, and is met unreservedly. In embryulcia, one life is sacrificed in the hope and with the reasonable prospect of saving another more valued: this is done too sometimes where there is an alternative presented, the Cæsarian section, which destroys neither of absolute necessity, but subjects the better life to very great risk.

Patients themselves frequently prefer the prompter and more lenient motives of death which our science refuses to inflict. In summing up the motives of suicide in one hundred and thirty-one cases, whose causes are supposed to be known, Prevost tells us that thirty-four, more than one-fourth of the whole number, committed self-murder to rid themselves of the oppressive burden of physical disease. Winslow gives us an analysis of thirteen hundred and thirty-three suicides from Pinel, Esquirol, Burrows, and others. Of these, there were but two hundred and fifty that did not present obvious appearances of bodily ailment; and although it is not stated how many of them sought death voluntarily as a refuge from physical suffering, it would be unreasonable to doubt that this was the purpose with a very large proportion. I am far from advocating the propriety of yielding to this desire or gratifying the propensity; nay, I would, on the other hand, earnestly endeavor to remove or repress it, as is now the admitted rule.

I hold fully, with Pascal, that, according to the principles of Christianity, which in this entirely oppose the false notions of paganism, a man “does not possess power over his own life.” I acknowledge and maintain that the obligation to perform unceasingly, and to the last and utmost of our ability, all the duties which appertain to our condition, renders absolutely incompatible the right supposed by some to belong to every one to dispose of himself at his own will. But I would present the question for the serious consideration of the profession, whether there does not, now and then, though very rarely, occur an exceptional case, in which they might, upon full and frank consultation, be justified before God and man in relieving, by the efficient use of anæsthetics, at whatever risk, the ineffable and incurable anguish of a fellow-creature laboring under disease of organic destructiveness, or inevitably mortal; such, for example, as we are doomed to witness in hydrophobia, and even more clearly in some instances of cancerous and fungoid degeneration, and in the sphacelation of organs necessary to life, or parts so connected as to be indispensable, yet not allowing either of removal or restoration?

I have left myself scarcely time for a few remarks upon death, psychologically considered. How is the mind affected by the anticipation and actual approach of death? The answer will obviously depend upon and be influenced by a great diversity of contingencies, moral and physical. The love of life is an instinct implanted in us for wise purposes; so is the fear of pain. Apart from this, I do not believe, as many teach, that there is any instinctive fear of death. Education, which instills into us, when young, the fear of spectres; religious doctrines, which awake in us the terror of “something after death;” conscience, which, when instructed, “makes cowards of us all;” associations of a revolting character—

“The knell, the shroud, the mattock, and the grave—
The deep, damp vault, the darkness, and the worm;”

these startle and appal us.

“Man makes a death that nature never made,
Then on the point of his own fancy falls.
And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one.”

We sympathize duly with every instinct of nature; we all feel the love of life, and accord readily in the warmest expression of it; but we recoil from every strong exhibition of the fear of death as unreasonable and dastardly.

When Claudio reminds his noble sister that “death is a fearful thing,” she replies well—“and shamed life a hateful!” But when he rejoins—

“The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death;”

we anticipate her in bidding him “Perish! for a faithless coward, and a beast.”

In the same contemptible and shrinking spirit, Mæcenas, in a passage from Seneca—

“Vita, dum superest bene est
Hunc mihi vel acuta
Si sedeam cruce, sustine.”

Among hypochondriacs, we often meet with the seemingly paradoxical combination of an intense dread of death unassociated with any perceptible attachment to life; a morbid and most pitiable condition, which urges some to repeated, but ineffectual attempts at suicide. I know not a state of mind more utterly wretched.

Both these sentiments, whether instinctive or educational, are, we should observe, very strikingly influenced by circumstances. Occasionally, they seem to be obliterated, or nearly so; not only in individuals, but in large masses, nay, in whole communities; as during great social convulsions; through the reign of a devastating pestilence; under the shock of repeated disorders of the elements; as in earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storms, and inundations; in protracted sieges, and in shipwrecks. The Reign of Terror produced this state of feeling in France, and thousands went to the scaffold indifferently, or with a jest. Boccacio and others have pictured the same state of undejected despair, if such a phrase be permitted, in which men succumb to fate, and say, with a sort of cheerful hardihood, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” losing thus all dread even of the plague. Pliny the younger, in his flight from Mycena, under the fatal shower of ashes from Vesuvius, heard, amidst the darkness, the prayers of wretches “who desired to die, that they might be released from the expectation of death.” And Byron, in his magnificent description of the shipwreck, in Don Juan, tells us—

“Some leaped overboard with dreadful yell,
As eager to anticipate the grave.”

Shakspeare’s Constance, in her grief, draws well the character of death, as—

“Misery’s love,
The hate and terror of prosperity.”

A woman who has lost her honor; a soldier convicted of poltroonery; a patriot who sees his country enslaved; a miser robbed; a speculator bankrupt; a poet unappreciated, or harshly criticized, as in poor Keats’s case—

“Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article”—

all these seem to loathe life, or, at any rate, lose much of their fondness for it. It is curious to remark, too, how little, as in the last-mentioned instance, will suffice to extinguish, abruptly or gradually, this usually tenacious instinct. A man in York cut his throat, because, as he left in writing, “he was tired of buttoning and unbuttoning.” The occurrence of a loathsome but very curable disease in a patient of mine, just when he was about to be married, induced him to plunge among the breakers off Sullivan’s Island, on one of the coldest days of our coldest winter. A Pole in New York wrote some verses just before the act of self-destruction, implying that he was so weary of uncertainty as to the truth of the various theories of the present and future life, that he “had set out on a journey to the other world to find out what he ought to believe in this.”

We are always interested in observing the conduct of brave men, who exhibit a strongly-marked love of life, with little or no fear of death. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Herault Sechelles, who commenced their revolutionary career as reckless as they seemed ferocious, having attained elevation, acquired wealth, and married beautiful women, became merciful and prudent. Hunted in their turn by the bloodhounds of the time, they made the most earnest endeavors to escape, but displayed a noble courage in meeting their fate when inevitable.

It is a trite but true remark, that men will boldly face one mode of death, and shrink timidly from another. A soldier, whom discipline will lead without flinching “up to the imminent deadly breach,” will cower before a sea-storm. Women, even in the act of suicide, dreading explosion and blood, prefer poison and drowning. Men very often choose firearms and cutting instruments, which habit has made familiar.

If the nervous or sensorial system escape lesion during the ravages of disease, the conduct of the last hour will be apt to be consistent with the previous character of the individual. Hobbes spoke gravely of death as “a leap in the dark.” Hume talked lightly of Charon and his ferry-boat. Voltaire made verses with his usual levity—

“Adieu, mes amis! adieu, la compagnie!
Dans deux heures d’ici, mon âme aneantie
Sera ce que je fus deux heures avant ma vie.”

Keats murmured, poetically, “I feel the flowers growing on my grave.” Dr. Armstrong died prescribing for a patient; Lord Tenterden, uttering the words “Gentlemen of the Jury, you will find;” General Lord Hill, exclaiming “Horrid war!” Dr. Adams, of the Edinburgh High School, “It grows dark; the boys may dismiss!” The last words of La Place were, “Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose; ce que nous ignorons, est immense!”

The history of suicide, of death in battle, and of executions, is full of such instances of consistent conduct and character. Madame Roland desired to have pen and paper accorded to her, at the “Place de la Guillotine,” that she might, as she phrased it, “set down the thoughts that were rising in her mind.” Sir Thomas More jested pleasantly as he mounted the scaffold. Thistlewood, the conspirator, a thoughtful man, remarked to one of his fellow-sufferers that, “in five minutes more, they would be in possession of the great secret.” When Madame de Joulanges and her sisters were executed, they chanted together the Veni Creator on their way from the prison to the fatal spot. Head after head fell under the axe, but the celestial strain was prolonged until the very last voice was hushed in the sudden silence of death.

The delirium of the moribund exhibits itself in diversified and often contrasted manifestations. Symonds looks upon it as closely analogous to the condition of the mind in dreaming. A popular and ancient error deserves mention, only to be corrected; that the mind, at the near approach of dissolution, becomes unusually clear, vigorous, and active.

“The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks which Time has made.”