442 



Such is the course of natural death; the brain ceases to receive 

 the weakened heart, a sufficient quantity of blood to keep up sensibility; 

 there remains still some degree of contractility in the respiratory mus- 

 cles ; it is soon exhausted, however, and the circulatory motion of the 

 blood ceases with the life of all the organs, of which this fluid is one of 

 the principal movers. 



As to accidental death, it is always determined by the cessation of the 

 action of the heart and brain ; for, the death of the lungs occasions 

 that of the whole body, only by preventing the action of the heart, by in- 

 terrupting its influence oil the encephalic organ. In natural death, 

 therefore, life becomes extinguished, from the circumference to the 

 centre; in accidental death, on the contrary, the centre is affected be- 

 fore the extremities. 



Bichat, in his work entitled, Eecherches sur la vie et la mort, has given a 

 very complete account of the manner in which the organs of the animal 

 economy cease to act in articulo mortis 5 but like all the authors who 

 went before him, he has limited his inquiries to certain functions. No 

 one has attempted to extend them to the phenomena of the action 

 of the brain, nor has one traced the order in which the various 

 faculties of thought and of sensation vanish. I shall endeavour faith- 

 fully to mention the results of several hundred observations of my own 

 on this subject. 



The close of life is marked by phenomena similar to those with which 

 it began. The circulation first manifested itself, and ceases last. The 

 right auricle is the part first seen to pulsate in the embryo, and in death 

 is the last to retain its motion. The phenomena of nutrition, to which 

 the foetal existence is almost entirely limited, continue, even when the 

 organs destined to establish a relation with the beings that surround us, 

 have long been sunk into a slumber from which they are never to be 

 moused. 



The following is the order in which the intellectual faculties cease and 

 are decomposed*. Reason, the exclusive attribute of man, first forsakes 

 him. He begins by losing the faculty of associating judgments, and then 

 of comparing, of bringing together, and of connecting, a number of ideas, 

 so as to judge of their relations. The patient is then said to have 

 lost his conciousness, or to be delirious. This delirium has generally 

 for its subject the ideas that are most familiar to the patient, and his pre- 

 vailing passion is easily recognized. The miser talks, in the most in- 

 4iscreBt manner, of his hidden treasures, the unbeliever dies haunted by 

 religious apprehensions. Sweet recollections of a distant native land, 

 then it is that ye return with your all powerful energy and delight ! ! 



After reasoning and judgment, the faculty of associating ideas is next 

 completely destroyed. The same occurs in fainting, as I once experien- 

 ced in myself: I was conversing with one of my friends, when I experi- 

 enced an insuperable difficulty in associating two ideas, from the compa- 

 rison of which I wished to form a judgment. Yet syncope was not com- 

 plete,! still preserved memory and the faculty of feeling. I could dis- 



* I need not inform the reader, that I am not here speaking 1 of the immortal soul, 

 of that divine emanation which outlives matter, and which, freed from our perishable 

 part, returns to the, Almighty. I am speaking merely of the intellectual faculties com- 

 mon to man, and to those animals, which, like him, are provided with a brain. Ait* 



