Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 August 1875 — Can a Dead Man Groan? [ARTICLE]

Can a Dead Man Groan?

Dr. E. Holland writes as follows on this subject in the British Medical Journal: “ The possibility and probability alike of such a circumstance as the utterance of a groan after somnatic death are sufficiently heterodox to ordinary credence to induce me to record the fact of my having, in connection with others, heard a veritable dead man groan. J. 8., aged fifty-seven, committed suicide by hanging. After he had teen very effectually suspended for an hour he was out down by me and two others. As the double rope was slackened from the neck air escaped from the thorax through the larynx, and a pro longed, rather loud groan was the consequence. The two men who assisted me exclaimed: ‘He ain’t dead;’ and I, for the moment, foil in with their views, ripped open his clothes, and practiced artificial respiration; hut I soon noted that ‘there was not the slightest attempt at respiration; that the heart was still to eye, hand and ear, and that his well-opened eyes were glased as only a dead man’s eyes glaze, and that the dilated pupils ware insensible to strong light. He was certainly dead, and dead from the first, and the groan we all heard had, I imagine, the following causation: The suicide braces his body for the final throe by taking a deep breath; and, when hanging is the method adopted, the constriction of the air passages is too immediate and effectual to allow this air to escape; but, when the rbpe is relaxed, the lungs and thorax contract with sufficient force to occasion a groan, even an hour after death.”