152 NOTES ON THE POST-MORTEM EXAMINATION OF A MAN 



Sardinian lancet is employed with the same murderous impartiality 

 against ecclesiastics, as we knew it to be against princes and 

 statesmen. The case is to be found, somewhat abridged by Pro- 

 fessor Kussmaul, in Canstatt's ' Jahresbericht ' for 1857, Band ii, 

 Allgemeine Pathologie, pp. 46, 47; and as, whether in the Italian 

 original, or in the German report, it is not accessible to all English 

 readers, there is the more reason for giving it in extenso. 



A. Melis, born 1753, at Gastegli, in Sardinia, lived for forty 

 years as a minorite brother in Spain, till, in consequence of the 

 political troubles there, he was expelled thence, with some other 

 clergy, and returned to Sardinia. There he obtained a small bene- 

 fice. He was of a very jovial temperament, and took pleasure in 

 having his affairs go on after a fixed and settled plan. He was of 

 middle size, strongly built, and of a good digestion ; fond of the 

 pleasures of the table and of good wine. Every now and then he 

 complained of feeling himself full-blooded, languid {eingenommen), 

 and of diminished appetite ; and upon such occasions he betook 

 himself to purgatives and bleeding. In his lifetime he had sub- 

 mitted himself to some hundreds of bleedings. He often made short 

 journeys on foot or on horseback, and he loved hunting. Victor 

 Emmanuel II. wished to see the old priest of 104. Melis made a 

 journey of some days through Sardinia on horseback, then took 

 ship for Genoa, and on arriving at Turin had an old woman of 

 107 introduced to him. He was much feted there, in spite of the 

 old man's adage — 'Young man, if thou goest so fast, thou wilt 

 never grow old ; ' and he surfeited himself, laughing and boasting 

 about his iron constitution, on cheese, tunny, and wine. He was 

 attacked by pneumonia, and in spite of three bleedings, of which 

 one amounted to nearly nine ounces (250 grammes), purgatives, 

 and so forth, he died sixteen days after his admission into the 

 hospital. 



The curly black hair of the head and the teeth were in perfect 

 preservation ; the body was very muscular and very fat. There was 

 slight rigidity of the limbs twenty-four hours after death. The 

 bones of the thorax were very fragile, the costal cartilages quite 

 ossified, the diploe and sutures of the cranial bones had disappeared. 

 The dura mater was beset here and there with bony plates. The 

 basilar and vertebral arteries were ossified, and there were incrusta- 

 tions on the aortic valves, on the aorta itself, and on many of its 



