Among the promptest modes of extinguishing life is the electric fluid. A flash of lightning will destroy the coagulability of the blood, as well as the contractility of the muscular fibre; the dead body remaining flexible. A blow on the epigastrium kills instantly with the same results. Soldiers fall sometimes in battle without a wound; the impulse of a cannon-ball passing near the pit of the stomach is here supposed to be the cause of death. The effect in these two last instances is ascribed by some to “a shock given to the semilunar ganglion, and the communication of the impression to the heart;” but this is insufficient to account either for the quickness of the occurrence, or the peculiar changes impressed upon the solids and fluids. Others are of opinion that the whole set of respiratory nerves is paralyzed through the violent shock given to the phrenic, “thus shutting up,” as one writer expresses it, “the fountain of all the sympathetic actions of the system.” This hypothesis is liable also to the objections urged above; and we must acknowledge the suddenness and character of the results described to be as yet unexplained, and in the present state of our knowledge inexplicable.
On the field of battle, it has been observed that the countenances of those killed by gun-shot wounds are usually placid, while those who perish by the sword, bayonet, pike, or lance, offer visages distorted by pain, or by emotions of anger or impatience. Poisons differ much among themselves as to the amount and kind of suffering they occasion. We know of none which are absolutely free from the risk of inflicting severe distress. Prussic acid gives perhaps the briefest death which we have occasion to observe. I have seen it, as Taylor states, kill an animal, when applied to the tongue or the eye, almost before the hand which offered it could be removed. Yet in the case of Tawell, tried for the murder of Sarah Hart, by this means, there was abundant testimony that many, on taking it, had time to utter a loud and peculiar scream of anguish: and in a successful attempt at suicide made by a physician of New York city, we have a history of appalling suffering and violent convulsion. So I have seen in suicide with opium, which generally gives an easy and soporose death resembling that of apoplexy, one or two instances in which there were very great and long-protracted pain and sickness.