THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH. 271 



points of his organs and his humors. Here it begins to corrupt the 

 fluids, to disorganize the tissues, to destroy the equipoise and endanger 

 the harmony. This process is more or less lingering and deceitful, and, 

 when we note the manifest signs of death, we may be sure that the 

 work lacked no deliberate preparation. 



These ideas of Leibnitz, like most of the conceptions of genius, 

 waited long after the time of their appearance for confirmation by 

 demonstrative experiment. Before his day, bodies were dissected 

 only for the sake of studying in them the conformation and normal 

 arrangement of the organs. When this study was once completed, 

 science took up the methodical inquiry into the changes produced in 

 the different parts of the body by diseases. Not until the end of the 

 eighteenth century did death in action become the subject of investi- 

 gation by Bichat. 



Bichat is the greatest of the physiological historians of death. The 

 famous work he has left on this subject, his "Physiological Researches 

 upon Life and Death," is as noteworthy for the grandeur of its general 

 ideas, and its beauty of style, as for its precision of facts and nicety of 

 experiment. To this day it remains the richest mine of recorded truths 

 as to the physiology of death. Having determined the fact that life is 

 seriously endangered only by alterations in one of the three essential 

 organs, the brain, the heart, and the lungs, a group forming the vital 

 tripod, Bichat examines how the death of one of these three organs 

 assures that of the others, and in succession the gradual stoppage of 

 all the functions. In our day, the advance of experimental physiology 

 in the path so successfully traversed by Bichat, has brought to light 

 in their minutest details the various meehanical processes of death, and, 

 what is of far greater consequence, has disclosed an entire order of 

 activities heretofore only suspected to be at work in the corpse. The 

 theory of death has been built up by slow degrees along with that of 

 life, and several practical questions that had remained in a state of un- 

 certainty, such as that of the signs of real death, have received the 

 most decisive answer in the course of these researches. 



I. 



Bichat pointed out that the complete life of animals is made up of 

 two orders of phenomena, those of circulation and nutrition, and those 

 that fix the relations of the living being with its environment. He 

 distinguishes organic life from animal life, properly so called. Vege- 

 tables have only the former ; animals possess both, intimately blended. 

 Now, on the occurrence of death, these two sorts of life do not disap- 

 pear at one and the same moment. It is the animal life that suffers 

 the first stroke ; the most manifest activities of the nervous system are 

 those which come to a halt before all the rest. How is this stoppage 

 brought about ? We must consider separately the order of occir- 



