NATURAL EUTHANASIA. 617 



1737), who succeeded in sending electricity through 1,256 feet of 

 moist packthread. 



A little reflection will enable you to vary these experiments indefi- 

 nitely. Rub your excited sealing-wax or glass against the tin plate 

 of your electroscope, and cause the leaves to diverge. Touch the 

 plate with any one of the conductors mentioned in the list ; the elec- 

 troscope is immediately discharged. Touch it with a semi-conductor; 

 the leaves fall as before, but less promptly. Touch the plate finally 

 with an insulator ; the electricity cannot j^ass, and the leaves remain 

 unchanged. 



-*- 



NATURAL EUTHANASIA.' 



By B. W. EICHAKDSON, M. D., F. K. S. 



BY tlie strict law of Nature a man should die as unconscious of his 

 death as of his birth. 



Subjected at birth to what would be, in the after-conscious state, 

 an ordeal to which the most cruel of deaths were not possibly more 

 severe, he sleeps through the process, and only upon the subseqxient 

 awakening feels the impressions, painful or pleasant, of the world into 

 which he is delivered. In this instance the perfect law is fulfilled, 

 because the carrying of it out is retained by Nature herself: human 

 free-will and the caprice that springs from it have no influence. 



By the hand of Nature death were equally a painless portion. 

 The cycle of life completed, the living being sleeps into death when 

 Nature has her way. 



This pui-ely j^ainless process, this descent by oblivious trance into 

 oblivion, this natural physical death, is the true euthanasia; and it is 

 the duty of those we call physicians to secure for man such good 

 health as shall bear him in activity and happiness onward in his 

 course to this goal. For eiithanasia, though it be open to every one 

 born of every race, is not to be had by any save through obedience to 

 those laws which it is the mission of the physician to learn, to teach, 

 and to enforce. Euthanasia is the sequel of health, the happy death 

 engrafted on the perfect life. 



When the physician has taught the world how this benign process 

 of Nature may be secured, and the world has accepted the lesson, 

 death itself will be practically banished; it will be divested equally 

 of fear, of sorrow, of sufiering. It will come as a sleep. 



If you ask what proof there is of the possibility of such a consum- 

 mation, I point to our knowledge of the natural phenomena of one 



' From "Diseases of Modem Life," by Dr. B. W. Richardson, now in press of D. 

 Applcton & Co. 



