90 On the Condition of the Blood 
seeing the eyes of my. dead patient open and move slowly in 
a downward direction. ‘This was followed, a minute or two 
subsequently, by the movement of the right arm (previously 
lying by his side) across the chest. There was likewise a 
slight movement of his right leo. The motion of the eyes 
occurred but once ; those of the limbs were repeated to a 
ereater or less degree four or five times, and fully half an 
hour elapsed before they entirely ceased. ‘These movements 
were not by such fits and jerks as are usually the result of 
spasmodic action.” 
Dr. Bennet Dowler, of New Orleans, mentions the case 
of an Irishman, aged twenty-eight, in which, not long after 
death from yellow fever, the left hand was carried by a 
reoular motion to the throat, and then to the crown of the 
head ; the right arm followed the same route on the right 
side; the left arm was then carried back to the throat and 
thence to the breast, reversing all its original motions, and 
finally, the right hand and arm did exactly the same. 
Dr. Dowler proved, by completely separating limbs which 
exhibited these movements from the trunk of the body, 
that the influence of the nervous system was not in any 
degree essential to their production.* 
Now, admitting that post-mortem movements have been 
seen after death by apoplexy, &c, yet they have never been 
of the character described after death by cholera and yellow 
fever. If it could be once proved that the symptoms of | 
cholera were due to the presence of a new growth in the 
blood, molecular or cellular, then seeing the close relation 
that exists between the muscular fibres and their capillaries, 
and between the latter and the components of the nervous 
centres, it would not be difficult to trace these post-mortem 
muscular movements to molecular changes still going on in 
the blood, changes which I have before alluded to as produc- 
ing heat, and now apparently motion. 
I am proud to bring the thoughts of my late friend, W.F. 
Barlow, in unison with my own. He says, “There is some 
stimulus or other, though we know it not, which irritates 
the muscles after death from cholera. Is it possible that 
changes in the blood go on, and stimulate their fibres, or 
the minute branches of the motor nerves which ramity 
therein? Further inquiry may one day solve what is com- 
plex now, by finding out circumstances necessary to an 
* Oarpenter’s Human Physiology, Sixth Edition. 
