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 discerned, 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 character. 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 excellent, but we are safe henceforward in regarding the sexton'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 heart's 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 commission named in 1848, by the Academy of Sciences, to award the prize of competition as to the signs of true death, "when positive cessation of pulsations of the heart in the subject has been ascertained, which is immediately followed, if it has not been preceded, by cessation of respiration, and of the functions of sensation and motion." The remote signs equally deserve attention. Of these, three are recognized: corpse-like rigidity, resistance to the action of galvanic currents, and putrefaction. As we have already seen, rigidity does not begin till several hours after death, while general and complete disappearance of muscular contractility, under the stimulus of currents, and, last of all, putrefaction, are only manifest at a still later period. These remote signs, particularly the last, have this advantage, that they may be ascertained by those unacquainted with medicine, and it is very well to pay some attention to them in countries where physicians are not charged with the verification of the disease, but they are of no importance wherever there are doctors to examine the heart with instruments, and to decide promptly and surely upon the death, from the complete stoppage of pulsation in that organ. At the beginning of the century, Hufeland, and several other physicians, convinced that all the signs of death then known were uncertain, except putrefaction, proposed and obtained, in Germany, the establishment of a certain number of mortuary houses, intended to receive, and keep for some time, the bodies
