3l6 LIFE AND DEATH. 



grouping of the parts, the injury received by the 

 brain affects by repercussion the other organs, and 

 leads in the long run to the arrest of elementary life 

 in all the anatomical elements. The death of the 

 whole is then complete. 



Doctors have therefore a two-fold reason for saying 

 that the brain may cause death. The death of the 

 brain suppresses the highest manifestation of life, and, 

 in the second place, by a more or less remote counter 

 stroke, it suppresses life in all the rest of the system. 



Death is a Process. — Besides, the fact is general. 

 The death of one part always involves the death of 

 the rest — i.e.^ universal death. A living organism 

 cannot be at the same time alive and a cemetery. The 

 corpses cannot exist side by side with the living 

 elements. The dead contaminates the living, or in 

 some other way involves it in its ruin. Death is 

 propagated ; it is a progressive phenomenon which 

 begins at one poirft and gradually is extended to the 

 whole. It has a beginning and a duration. In other 

 words, the death of a complex organism is a process. 

 And further, the end of a simple organism, of a 

 protozoan, of a cell, is itself a process infinitely 

 more shortened. 



The very perfection of the organism is therefore the 

 cause of its fragility. It is the degree of solidarity of 

 the parts one with another which involves the one set 

 in the catastrophe of the rest, just as in a delicate 

 piece of mechanism the derangement of a wheel brings^ 

 nearer and nearer the total breakdown. The im- 

 portant parts, the lungs, the heart, the brain, suffer no 

 serious alteration without the reflex being felt through- 

 out. But there are also wheels less evident, the 

 integrity of which is scarcely less necessary. 



