THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH. 335 



quantity of the prescribed narcotic. The report spreading 

 among the villagers, they insist on his disinterment, which 

 is allowed. Gathering in a crowd at the cemetery, they 

 take up the coffin, open it, and are met by a horrible sight. 

 The miserable man had turned over in his coffin, the blood 

 gushing from the two opened veins had soaked the shroud ; 

 his features were frightfully contorted, and his convulsed 

 limbs bore witness to the cruel anguish that had preceded 

 death. Most of the facts of this kind are of rather remote 

 date. The latest instances have happened in the country, 

 among an ignorant population, usually in neighborhoods 

 where no physician was called on to ascertain the decease, 

 that is, to distinguish the cases of seeming death from those 

 of true death. 



How, then, can we certainly know apparent from real 

 death? There is a certain number of positive signs of 

 death ; that is to say, signs which, when absolutely dis- 

 cerned, leave no room for mistake. Yet some physicians, 

 and many people who know nothing of science, are still so 

 doubtful about the certainty of these signs as to wish that 

 physiology could detect others of a more positive charac- 

 ter. A zealous philanthropist quite lately gave a sum for 

 a prize of twenty thousand francs to the discoverer of an 

 infallible sign of death. Doubtless the intention is ex- 

 cellent, but we are safe henceforward in regarding the sex- 

 ton's work without alarm ; the signs already known are 

 clear enough to prevent any mistake, and to make the fatal 

 risk of premature burial impossible. 



We must point out, in the first place, the immediate 

 signs of death. The first and the most decisive is the 

 absolute stoppage of the heart's pulsations, noted for a 

 duration of at least five minutes, not by the touch, but by 

 the ear. " Death is certain," says the reporter of the com- 

 mission named in 1848 by the Academy of Sciences to 

 award the prize of competition as to the signs of true death. 



