396 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and all the modern inhabitants of Italy, insist on burying their dead 

 within forty-eight hours ? Simply — say the legislators — because the 

 climate requires it ; i. e., because it would not be fair to the living to 

 allow the dead to remain unburied for a longer space than two days 

 and two nights. Query : was the climate of Italy under Julius Caesar 

 very different, in point of heat or moisture, from the climate of Italy 

 under King Humbert ? 



But it has always, and in all countries, been difficult to ascertain 

 the difference between Toclt and Schemtodt — death and the semblance 

 of death. Dr. Gandolfi, a learned Italian writer, whose work on 

 " Forensic Medicine " * was revised by the illustrious Mittermayer, is 

 of opinion that medical men are themselves liable to make mistakes on 

 this important question. He says — 1. That " the organic phenomena 

 which precede apparent death can not of themselves be distinguished 

 from those which precede real death, and that for a certain time it will 

 be difficult to decide, scientifically, whether life be suspended, or ex- 

 tinct " ; and, 2. That " many phenomena which announce real death are 

 the common and necessary indications of apparent death, as for in- 

 stance the want of motion, of sense, of breathing, and of pulsation." 



These are terrible sentences ! How many persons are denounced 

 as dead simply because they have ceased to breathe and move and show 

 signs of a pulse — persons who, according to Gandolfi, may not, in all 

 cases, be ready for burial ! It is Gandolfi's opinion that persons " de- 

 nounced as dead " may in some rare instances be the witnesses — the 

 mute and fear-stricken witnesses — of their own funeral ; that they may 

 know perfectly well that they are going to be put into coffins, and 

 thence into the earth, and yet be powerless, alive as they are, to avert 

 the catastrophe of a legal murder ! The following illustration of this 

 point is authenticated by Bruhier, and is quoted, in slightly different 

 words, by Dr. Gandolfi : 



A schoolmaster in Mohlstadt, named Wenzel, was legally denounced 

 as dead, and got ready for burial. He was to be buried on a certain 

 fixed day, but his sister, who lived far off, had not arrived ; and it was 

 decided that the funeral should be postponed. The " deceased," in 

 his winding-sheet, unable to move, and apparently unable to breathe, 

 heard with joy of this delay, and tried, but utterly in vain, to open his 

 eyes, which were fast closed. His sister arrived, and, finding him dead, 

 burst into a paroxysm of tears, and, seizing his hand, reproved him 

 passionately for thus dying without one word of farewell. She took 

 his head between her hands, and, pressing it wildly, looked at him 

 with a fixed and half-demented scrutiny. The eyelids of the " de- 

 ceased " were seen to quiver ; the eyes half opened ; he was saved ! 

 He had succeeded in putting his latent self in communication with the 

 outer world ; and what he himself had begun the doctors completed. 

 Here was a man who, but for his sister's delay, would have been buried 

 * "Medicina Forensa Analitica," by Giovanni Gandolfi, Milan, 1863. 



