Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 March 1890 — Death in Fire. [ARTICLE]

Death in Fire.

A physician has just been writing on the subject of death by fire, and he seeks to correct certain common errors concerning it. Our estimate of the intensity of the pain involved in such a mode of death is very natural; nothing more so. Knowing the interne pain that follows the burning of a small part of the flesh, we naturally imagine that when it person is wholly exposed to the flame that intense local pain is multiplied in the exact proportion of the surface exposed to the influence of the fire. Happily, however, there are the very best reasons for regarding all these distressing impressions i;8 erroneous. In nearly or quite all forms of exposure, torture and death, experience has proved that n ture kindly draws over the v ctim the sheltering veil of oblivion. The drowning man floats away in a peac-ful rfrenm of illusions. The man who falls from a piecipice is made insensible by the blow. The too frequent victim of a rai rotd c^saster is stupefied at the first shook knows nothing la{er,l The smoke nndJiamen that are to destroy life brinq th*ir< blesse I anodyne, as the first step in the sad proceeding. It is therefore well to reconstruct the almost univer-sl but erroneous presumption that those wlo m-et death in a conflagration or many other forms of violence or apparent Buflering must of necessity endure terrible pain. Di-tressing as those modes of death may seem, it is both reasonable and eminently consolatory to assure ourselves that after the very first few moments the event is quite painless.