grouping of the parts, the injury received by the brain affects by repercussion the other organs, and leads in the long run to the arrest of elementary life in all the anatomical elements. The death of the whole is then complete.
Doctors have therefore a two-fold reason for saying that the brain may cause death. The death of the brain suppresses the highest manifestation of life, and, in the second place, by a more or less remote counter stroke, it suppresses life in all the rest of the system.
Death is a Process.—Besides, the fact is general. The death of one part always involves the death of the rest—i.e., universal death. A living organism cannot be at the same time alive and a cemetery. The corpses cannot exist side by side with the living elements. The dead contaminates the living, or in some other way involves it in its ruin. Death is propagated; it is a progressive phenomenon which begins at one point and gradually is extended to the whole. It has a beginning and a duration. In other words, the death of a complex organism is a process. And further, the end of a simple organism, of a protozoan, of a cell, is itself a process infinitely more shortened.
The very perfection of the organism is therefore the cause of its fragility. It is the degree of solidarity of the parts one with another which involves the one set in the catastrophe of the rest, just as in a delicate piece of mechanism the derangement of a wheel brings nearer and nearer the total breakdown. The important parts, the lungs, the heart, the brain, suffer no serious alteration without the reflex being felt throughout. But there are also wheels less evident, the integrity of which is scarcely less necessary.
