THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH. 325 
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 hearts 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, 
