Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1885 — Sleep, Trance, and Death. [ARTICLE]

Sleep, Trance, and Death.

The relationship between sleep, “the cousin of death," and death itself is probably reklfas well as apparent. The distance which separates them is great, but they are intermediate conditions, grades of disolution as of development. Among these the similar states of trance and hibernation are worthy of special notice. For sleep and for trance one cause, exhaustion chiefly of nervous matter, but more or less of every organ and tissue, is assignable. The hysterical stupor is the sleep of nerve centers, worn out with the assault and conflict of stormy reflex action. Healthy sleep is the rest of physical elements wearied by the same strain applied more gradually. Cases have been recorded in which somnolence, continued for day? without cessation, has resembled trance in duration, while preserving all the ordinary features of natural sleep. Various facts support us in associating the hibernation of animals with the same train of organic or functional changes as the other unconscious states we have been considering. It comes like a habit; it has, one may say, annual return; its apparent cause is the oppression of external cold, and the animals which it affects are those which, from their bodily structure or habits, are subject to great periodic variations of temperature. Vital tissue is exhausted, and function is in part suspended, probably because the numbness of cold has taken hold upon the radicles of the outer circulation and that part of the brain surface which is connected with it by numerous anastomoses. In such amemia would seem to be the cause of the winter sleep, as there is evidence to show that it is also the cause of that temporary starvation of the brain which lulls without arresting its action, in the natural repose of each night. We may even regard the lethargy, ended by death, into which man falls when exposed to great cold, as a sort of mortal hibernation.— British Medical Journal.