Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 July 1888 — SHERIDAN’S ILLNESS. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

SHERIDAN’S ILLNESS.

Life Was Seemingly Restored by the Use of the Galvanic Battery. A Washington dispatch rehearses lor the first time in print the details of Gen. Sheridan’s apparent death when science itself could not have told that he had not passed away. There had been several sinking spells and hemorrhages of the bowels, which so exhausted the patient that he passed into unconsciousness, and during this period was the supreme moment when physicians, wife, brother, and friends all believed that the brave soldiier’s struggles were at last ended —that death had indeed come as a perhaps happy release. There was absolutely no pulse or respiration. The firm jaw had dropped and the eyes had opened and were glazed, the nose was pinched with that awful

pressure which seemingly can only come from death’s cold fingers. Father Chapelle had administered the last rites of the church. He stood beside the bedside, and his experienced eye, familiar with death in all its forms, noted the sure signs of dissolution. At last he turned away, after making the sign of the cross over the placid forehead, and went down to the ante-room, where Cols. Kellogg and Blount and Gen. McFeely were waiting. Holding up his hands he said: “All is over.” Meanwhile the watchers by the bedside were preparing to arrange the body in death, except that Dr. O’Reilly was still applying every device that science, and even desperate chance, could Suggest. He had opened the nightgown, and applying his ear ‘ to the heart, could detect no flutter of pulsation. He had noted all the marks of death, but persevered. Mrs. Sheridan was kneeling in prayer for the departecl soul. iThe physician seized the galvanic battery. One electrode he placed at the base of the neck, the other niton the inner side of the left thigh. The current generated, he has since said, was sufficient to have instantly killed a man in stalwart health. There was yet no sign of life. The physician then resorted to hypodermic injections of brandy. The minutes passed slowly, and five were counted. The watchful ear was again at the heart. There was a feeble bbat; then hardly perceptible respiration. Then the eyes opened and Mrß. Sheridan arose from, her knees and bent over her husband. There was a complete intelligence in the look he gave her, and it seemed as if the miracle of 1,800 years before had been repeated and the dead had come back to life. Perhaps it bad been. Science, still uncertain of its capabilities and possibilities, does not venture to say.