and all the modern inhabitants of Italy, insist on burying their dead within forty-eight hours? Simply—say the legislators—because the climate requires it; i. e., because it would not be fair to the living to allow the dead to remain unburied for a longer space than two days and two nights. Query: was the climate of Italy under Julius Cæsar very different, in point of heat or moisture, from the climate of Italy under King Humbert?
But it has always, and in all countries, been difficult to ascertain the difference between Todt and Scheintodt—death and the semblance of death. Dr. Gandolfi, a learned Italian writer, whose work on "Forensic Medicine"[1] was revised by the illustrious Mittermayer, is of opinion that medical men are themselves liable to make mistakes on this important question. He says—1. That "the organic phenomena which precede apparent death can not of themselves be distinguished from those which precede real death, and that for a certain time it will be difficult to decide, scientifically, whether life be suspended, or extinct"; and, 2. That "many phenomena which announce real death are the common and necessary indications of apparent death, as for instance the want of motion, of sense, of breathing, and of pulsation."
These are terrible sentences! How many persons are denounced as dead simply because they have ceased to breathe and move and show signs of a pulse—persons who, according to Gandolfi, may not, in all cases, be ready for burial! It is Gandolfi's opinion that persons "denounced as dead" may in some rare instances be the witnesses—the mute and fear-stricken witnesses—of their own funeral; that they may know perfectly well that they are going to be put into coffins, and thence into the earth, and yet be powerless, alive as they are, to avert the catastrophe of a legal murder! The following illustration of this point is authenticated by Bruhier, and is quoted, in slightly different words, by Dr. Gandolfi:
A schoolmaster in Mohlstadt, named Wenzel, was legally denounced as dead, and got ready for burial. He was to be buried on a certain fixed day, but his sister, who lived far off, had not arrived; and it was decided that the funeral should be postponed. The "deceased," in his winding-sheet, unable to move, and apparently unable to breathe, heard with joy of this delay, and tried, but utterly in vain, to open his eyes, which were fast closed. His sister arrived, and, finding him dead, burst into a paroxysm of tears, and, seizing his hand, reproved him passionately for thus dying without one word of farewell. She took his head between her hands, and, pressing it wildly, looked at him with a fixed and half-demented scrutiny. The eyelids of the "deceased" were seen to quiver; the eyes half opened; he was saved! He had succeeded in putting his latent self in communication with the outer world; and what he himself had begun the doctors completed. Here was a man who, but for his sister's delay, "would have been buried
- ↑ "Medicina Forensa Analitica," by Giovanni Gandolfi, Milan, 1863.
