VARIOUS WAYS OF REGARDING DEATH. 31I 



will oppose a more or less prolonged resistance to the 

 invasion of death. 



Medical Vieiv. — It is, however, these very facts and 

 details, this why and wherefore, which interest the 

 physiologist. The state of mind of the doctor in this 

 respect, again, is different. When, for instance, the 

 doctor declares that such and such a person is dead, 

 he is really making not so much a statement of fact 

 as a prediction. How many elements are still living 

 and will be capable of new birth in this corpse that 

 he has before his eyes? That is not what he asks 

 himself, nor is it what we should ask of him. He 

 knows, besides, that all these partial survivals will be 

 extinguished and will never find the conditions 

 necessary to reviviscence, and that the organization 

 will never be restored to its primal activity ; and this 

 is what he affirms. The fear of premature burial 

 which haunts so many imaginations is the fear of an 

 error in the prediction. It is to avoid this that 

 practical medicine has devoted so much of its 

 attention to the discovery of a certain — and early — 

 sign of death. By this we understand the discovery 

 of a certain prognostic sign of general deatJi. We 

 want a prognostic sign enabling us to assert that the 

 life of the brain is now extinguished and will never 

 be reanimated. And yet there are in that organism 

 many elements which are still alive. Many others 

 even may be born anew if we could give them 

 suitable conditions which they no longer meet with 

 in the animal machine now thrown out of gear. 

 What finer example could we give than the experi- 

 ment of Kuliabko, the Russian physiologist, who 

 kept a man's heart working and beating for eighteen 

 hours after the official verification of his death. 



21 



