will oppose a more or less prolonged resistance to the invasion of death.
Medical View.—It is, however, these very facts and details, this why and wherefore, which interest the physiologist. The state of mind of the doctor in this respect, again, is different. When, for instance, the doctor declares that such and such a person is dead, he is really making not so much a statement of fact as a prediction. How many elements are still living and will be capable of new birth in this corpse that he has before his eyes? That is not what he asks himself, nor is it what we should ask of him. He knows, besides, that all these partial survivals will be extinguished and will never find the conditions necessary to reviviscence, and that the organization will never be restored to its primal activity; and this is what he affirms. The fear of premature burial which haunts so many imaginations is the fear of an error in the prediction. It is to avoid this that practical medicine has devoted so much of its attention to the discovery of a certain—and early—sign of death. By this we understand the discovery of a certain prognostic sign of general death. We want a prognostic sign enabling us to assert that the life of the brain is now extinguished and will never be reanimated. And yet there are in that organism many elements which are still alive. Many others even may be born anew if we could give them suitable conditions which they no longer meet with in the animal machine now thrown out of gear. What finer example could we give than the experiment of Kuliabko, the Russian physiologist, who kept a man's heart working and beating for eighteen hours after the official verification of his death.
