Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1901 — The Act of Dying. [ARTICLE]

The Act of Dying.

The popular idea that the act of dying is a painful'process often causes a feai .1 death. But death from even the most painful mortal diseases is usually preceded by a period of cessation fropa suffering and partial or complete insensibility, resembling falling asleep, or the pleasant gradual unconsciousness caused by an anaesthetic. The common phrase ‘'death agony” is not warranted by what occurs in natural death, which is a complete relief from all pain. When death is owing to heart failure or syncope it is sudden and painless—perhaps pleasant. Death by hanging, there is reason to believe, is attended by a voluptuous spagm. Death by decapitation or electricity is only a momentary shock, hardly felt. Death by poisoning varies in painfulness according to the poison employed. Opium and other narcotics probably give a painless, perhaps a pleasant, dreamful death. Hemlock, as we know from the acoount of the death of Socrates, causes gradual insensibility, from below upward. On the other hand, arsenic, strychnine, carbolic and miners al acids, corrosive sublimate, tartar emetic, and other metallic poisons inflict slow and torturing death. Prussic acid, and cyanide of potassium cause quick and painful death.—The Humanitarian. Thirty years since newspapers were not known in Japan. Now there are over 700 periodicals.