Show DEATH IS PAINLESS I Said to Be So Even In Most Horrible Forma The Spectator D ath is nearly always Inless Man Maa Mandi Mands ds di generally from the cessation of the hearts functioning whatever the th more remote cause may have been The nerve cells may have ceased ed to act the muscles may have been worn out or orthe orthe orthe the heart may have been directly at attack attack tack d by acute or chronic disease But in m any case want of oxygen is s the determining factor except ic In the case cas of ot poisoning with prussic acid in which cae as the whole body is 15 dead bt bt fore the heart ceases to beat In every other case the cessation of t the hearts action j tomes omes first the general death dath d th of th the body afterward i fore the hat luart hs teases ease to function consciousness ceases Even in the most awful death known derth by burning mortality is rendered painless at an early earl earI stage by 7 suffocation It Is the first moment of o experience of ot the heat that is so ter terrible we think in Imagination that we could never endure endur it and wonder onder low how martyrs marty s faced it with such calm But apart from their state of ecstasy their sufferings ere vere soon I mercifully ended by Nature herself which app appears ars to set ery real limits to lo physical torture Thu Thus Livingstone tone when whom seized by a lion tells us that he h felt little pain or apprehension while nr Dr Alfred Altred Russel Wallace asserts that thit the seeming tragedies of animate na nature nature ture lure such as the killing of birds by b 1 of prey are not at all so 80 awful as they in our imagination We see with painful vividness the outward fact tact but we do not see the merciful anodyne furnished by natu v So io is it at a deathbed The see ee the clammy brow the gasping tot toe breath the rigor mortis sometimes the 1 contorted features all painful to be behold ber r hold JIOM Bit Bilt with perhaps the rUIn of the difficult respiration the dying man knows nothing of this and before rore he has bas actually expired nature has given en fn him a relief which the dearest dear st friend or most skillful physician could not Dot noti i have imparted There are also forms torms of death in which long before death arrives the will to live JIve has ceased the patient resigns himself and life lite gradually sinks to a vanishing point Thus death is physically and psycho psychologically psychologically logically painless a |