DR. PHILIP ON THE NATURE OF DEATH. 181 



of; and when the cause is both violent and sudden, its effects on these parts are often 

 such as immediately to destroy the circulation. 



The Experiments, an account of which the Society did me the honour to publish in 

 two papers in the Philosophical Transactions for 1815, prove that, although the heart 

 and vessels do not derive their power from the brain and spinal marrow, it may be 

 destroyed by impressions made on them. Thus it is that violent passions, either of a 

 pleasurable or painful nature, in consequence of the sympathy which subsists between 

 the sensitive and vital parts of these organs, have sometimes proved instantly fatal. 



Here we have an effect from the causes of disease wholly different from that of the 

 usual stimulants of life. The direct operation of the agent produces a state of debi- 

 lity in the sensitive system altogether of a different nature from that which constitutes 

 the healthy exhaustion of sleep ; and it will assist the memory and facilitate the means 

 of reference to regard as the second form of what, for the sake of distinction, I call 

 violent death, that which arises from all those causes which produce in the sensitive 

 system this species of debility in the first instance, that is, debility without previous 

 excitement, in whatever degree they have this effect; regarding, as the first species of 

 such a death, the form of death we have been considering, that in which the cause, 

 in the first instance, produces the stimulant effect, and consequently the exhaustion 

 of sleep. 



WHEN the cause of the second form of violent death, according to this division of 

 the subject, is extreme, no time is afforded for its less powerful effects to show them- 

 selves. When it is less violent, so that the circulation, though impaired, still goes on, 

 we find all the vital functions impaired along with it. The assimilating processes are 

 doubly assailed by the failing supply of nervous influence and the lessened powers of 

 circulation*. These effects, we have seen, may arise from the excess of the stimulant 

 operation of agents -)-, but they are not necessarily the consequence of any operation of 

 this kind, but may be as much the direct effect of the agent as the stimulant effect 

 itself. It is, the offending cause and state of body being the same, when the operation 

 of that cause is most powerful, that its debilitating effect is most unmixed. In pro- 

 portion as it is less powerful, the case partakes more of the nature of the form of 

 death, in which the first effect of the offending cause is that of a stimulant. 



This is readily explained. I have been at much pains, in my Inquiry into the 

 Laws of the Vital Functions, to point out that all agents capable of affecting the living 

 animal, whether making their first impression on the mind or body, applied in a cer- 

 tain degree, act as stimulants, in a greater degree, as sedatives ; that is, as means of 

 directly impairing the power of the part they act upon ;}:. We know of no exception 



* See note in p. 177. t See pp. 176 and 177. 



I Experimental Inquiry, Part II., the last ten pages of chap, xi.; and the observations on the term sedative in 

 my Treatise on the Influence of minute Doses of Mercury, which, from the want of some more appropriate term, 

 I shall here employ for all agents which impair the power of the whole or any part of the animal frame without 

 producing previous excitement. 



