THE PHYSIOLOGY OF DEATH.
"TIMOR mortis conturbat me " is the refrain of a melan- choly poem by a Scottish poet, and it is a refrain which is only too common in the literature of all times. Doubtless the feeling of dread is a combination of a purely physical terror and the moral apprehension of a "something after death" which may prove a far more awful reality than any experience known to us in this life. Paganism, as in the lament of Theocritus or the grief of Cicero over the loss of his daughter, dwells mainly on the physical fact. Christi- anity, on the other hand, cares little for the physical fact, which was faced with equanimity not only by its Founder and by the Apostles, but by thousands of nameless men and women, who were so possessed by a great idea and a pro- found affection that death in its most terrible forms was to them the most fleeting of all transient phenomena. But from the moral point of view, what a difference! The possibility of permanent ruin, of everlasting shame and banishment from the presence of God, and the " weight of glory" and the "earnest expectation," made the advent of death appear, if we may say so, something ex- citing, as when one is waiting for the gates of a mag- nificent palace to be opened. From the moral point of view the mystery of death remains where it did at the first preaching of Christianity. No word comes from that silent sacred shore which we can regard as an incontestable revela- tion. The dead may influence our lives, thoughts may be flashed into our minds from "worlds unquickened by the sun," —it is a quite reasonable hypothesis. But we do not know ; at least to most of us there is either no evidence, or so little that, like candid Dr. Johnson, we could wish for more. But from the physiological point of view, from the point of view of the moments in this world which actually precede the great change, we are learning not a little. The latest scientific dicta on the subject are found in a very interesting lecture delivered by Professor Nothnagel of Vienna, one of the first of contemporary physiologists, before the Society of Vienna Authors and Journalists.
So far as the physiological aspect of death is concerned, the lines of our Scottish poet need scarcely be echoed by a single mortal. This, says Professor Nothnagel, is the verdict of science. It is not only the wicked, but all men, with a very few exceptions, who have "no bands in their death." In a word, death is nearly always painless. Man dies generally from the cessation of the heart's functioning, whatever the more remote cause may have been. The nerve-cells may have ceased to act, the muscles may have been worn out, or
the heart may have been directly attacked by acute or chronie disease. Bnt in any case want of oxygen is the determining factor, except in the case of poisoning with prussic acid, in which case the whole body is dead before the heart ceases to beat. In every other case the cessation of the heart's action comes first, the general death of the body afterwards. Before the heart ceases to function consciousness ceases, Even in the most awful death known, death by burning, mortality is rendered painless at an early stage by suffocation, It is the first moment of experience of the heat that is so terrible; we think, in imagination, that we could never endure it, and wonder how martyrs faced it with such calm. But, apart from their state of spiritual ecstasy, their sufferings were soon mercifully ended by Nature herself, which appears to set very real limits to physical torture. Thus Livingstone, when seized by a lion, tells us that he felt little pain or apprehension; while Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace asserts that the seeming tragedies of animate Nature, such as the killing of birds by beasts of prey, are not at all so awful as they appear in our imagination. We see with pain- ful vividness the outward fact, but we do not see the merciful anodyne furnished by Nature. So is it at a death-bed. The observers see the clammy brow, the gasping for breath, the rigor mortis, sometimes the contorted features,—all painful to behold. Bat, with perhaps the exception of the difficult respiration, the dying man knows nothing of this, and before he has actually expired Nature has given him a relief which the dearest friend or moat skilful physician could not have imparted. There are also forms of death in which, long before death arrives, the "will to live" has ceased, the patient resigns himself, and life gradually sinks to a vanishing point. Thus death is physically and psychologically painless.
Such, according to Professor Nothnagel, is the verdict of science, stated, indeed, not as dogmatic fact, but as extreme probability, and which may, possibly, be actually demon- strated. In a recent article in these columns, commenting on an interesting paper by Mr. Joseph Jacobs, we agreed with him that the dread of death and the constant dwelling on the subject of death are greatly declining in the modern world. This is partly due to the fact that a belief in a universal order is penetrating every mind, and it must be that death is a part of that order. If the order is good, then death cannot be an evil; and as, on the whole, it is strongly held that the order is good, the general feeling about death must be profoundly modified by that belief. But when, as an adjunct to this general reasoning, we find as a matter of simple science that death is not one-tenth part so terrible a physical evil as numbers of diseases which we all accept as in the course of things, death will be still more completely de- throned from its position as " Bing of Terrors." Let us not be mistaken. Death will always be a source of pain and sadness to survivors. Even Christ Himself, we are told, wept over the grave of Lazarus; and this purely human emotion is shared by all the sons of men. Moreover, the decay of that body we have known so long, of those dear features which have expressed to us the loving thoughts of the spirit that dwelt within, the feeling that all this beautiful fabric through which alone we knew our friend is crumbling away,—this, so far as we can see, must always cause a pang to men's hearts, and the pang would be no less were the cremation of the body to be generally adopted. We live in a world of tragedy, and this is its supreme tragedy ; bat the tragic element of death lies not in mere Nature, but is woven by the human imagina- tion. But we cannot help believing that the more we know about death the less we shall fear it. Every moment, while the globe spins its way through the awful depths of space, dies an aged man, a little (Iliad, a tender woman, without pain, as naturally as each was born into this world. In the Middle Ages, whose often-talked-of faith was largely tinged with the hideous belief of a barbarism from which only a few had really emerged, and when death seemed rather the bewildering fiat of an unknown power than part of an inevitable process, it was natural that terror and dismay should have taken possession of men when confronted by death. The world was full of demons and goblins, with almost unlimited power over man- kind; even the protecting influence of the Church was hardly believed in, or at least only half believed in, by multi- tudes. Even to-day educated men will confess that they
would not care to spend a night alone in an old church or among the graves. We have not altogether shed the influ- ences of an earlier world, but we are doing so.
Man's legitimate desire is to be at home in the universe; not merely to understand it scientifically as far as he may, but to feel that it is his world, made for him, of which he is the heir, and in which he may and should live as a child in his father's house. This should be the aim of all rational culture. We have been emancipated from not a few of the terrors which beset primeval man, who found a magic in every bush and an unknown power in every rock or stone. The tremendous fact of death has naturally been the last to yield to reasonable views of the world; and it is significant that in the Apocalypse the seer declares that " the last enemy that shall be de- stroyed is death." But though it is true that, from a universal point of view death is an enemy, yet from a human and earthly point of view death is no more an enemy than birth. Apart from the fact that our globe could not support in terrestrial immortality the countless hosts that have lived and will live on its surface, it is clear that culture and pro- gress can only be brought about through the physical medium of successive generations. Death, in short, is a needful factor in the spiritual evolution of the race; and when we realise that it is not only natural but painless, we shall view it, doubtless, with deep subjective emotion, but without dismay. That change of attitude will, we feel convinced, reflect itself deeply in our future art, literature, and religion.
Previous page
