Page:Physiological Researches upon Life and Death.djvu/322

Rh cerebral action, or whether general death has been sudden. In those subjects brought to my amphitheatre, with wounds of the head, bloody effusions of the brain, the effect of apoplexy, &c. I have scarcely found two with the lungs in the same disposition. The state of repletion and lividity of the external surfaces, of the skin of the head, neck, &c. was equally variable.

Death, which succeeds to varous diseases, commences much more rarely in the brain than in the lungs. Nevertheless, in some paroxysms of acute fevers, the blood carried with violence to the brain, sometimes destroys its life. The patient has a delirium, as it is commonly called. If this delirium is raised to the highest degree it proves mortal, and then the series of phenomena is the same as that in sudden deaths of which we have just spoken.

There is a great number of cases besides that of acute fevers, in which the commencement of death may be in the brain, though this organ may not be the seat of the disease.

It is in these cases, particularly, that the state of plenitude or vacuity of the lungs varies so much. In general this state furnishes no hint as to the disease of which the patient has died; it merely indicates the manner in which the functions have ceased in the last moments of existence.

In page 8, at the head of the Section, for Organic life, the reader will please to read Animal life.