90 



the body, and the blood injected came out from all the divided 

 arteries and veins. 



Having saved nearly all the blood which flowed from these 

 vessels, I injected it anew. The last injection was made 45 

 minutes after 9 o'clock P. M. Ten minutes afterwards I found 

 that cadaveric rigidity had ceased in the hand, and that two 

 muscles only, out of the nineteen existing in that part, had not 

 resumed their irritability. Three muscles had become so very 

 irritable that a slight mechanical excitation was followed by a 

 contraction in the whole length of their fibres. 



At half past one o'clock A. M., seventeen hours and a half 

 after decapitation and four hours after the injection of blood, 

 there was still a slight irritability in the muscles of the hand. 



In this experiment I found that half a pound of defibri- 

 nated human blood was sufficient to give irritability, for seve- 

 ral hours, to seventeen of the muscles of a hand.* 



5th. An experiment on another guillotined man gave me 

 more interesting results. The decapitation had taken place 

 at 8 o'clock A. M. on the 12th of July, 1851. At 5 o'clock 

 P. M., cadaveric rigidity existed in almost all the muscles of 

 the arms and fore-arms. I separated them from the body, and 

 at G| o'clock I ascertained that cadaveric rigidity was increased, 

 and that only a few muscles were still slightly irritable. At 8 

 o'clock P. M, (12 hours after the decapitation) the muscles of the 

 two arms were completely deprived of irritability, and in full rigi- 

 dity, and the muscles of the forearms contracted only locally under 

 the influence of a mechanical irritation, and not at all when ex- 

 cited by a powerful magneto-electric current. Two other exami- 

 nations made, one at 9j and the other at 10 o'clock, gave the 

 same results. 



At 10 J o'clock two or three bundles of fibres of one of the 

 muscles of the fore-arm were the only parts where a mechanical 

 excitation produced a slight local contraction. All the other 

 muscles were perfectly stiff and deprived of irritability. 



Twenty-five minutes after 10 o'clock there was no appearance 

 of irritability remaining in any muscle. 



I then began the preparations for the injection of blood, with 



* For a full account of the circumstances of this experiment, see my paper 

 >in the Gaz. Medic.de Paris, i. vi. 1851, p. 421. 



