Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin.

  • George Catlin
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    107/114 page 99
    noticed, there is one of the list too universal and too fatal to be passed over without some final and more impressive observations. The Nightmare. (The reader, to understand me on this subject, should turn back to the illustration on page 24, and keep it before him as he reads.) No person on earth who has waked from a fit of the nightmare will dispute the fact, that when con- sciousness came, he found his mouth and throat wide open, and parched with dryness and fever, and difficult to moisten. No man in existence ever had a fit of the nightmare whilst sleeping with his mouth closed. It is a fair inference, therefore, that sleeping with the mouth open is the cause of that frightful (and though not generally supposed) deadly disease. I say deadly, because every attack of the night- mare, I proclaim, is the beginning of death ! A man in a fit of the nightmare is dying. In the repose of his system, when respiration is necessarily feeble, the over-draught of air into the sleeping lungs, through the open mouth, surpasses the feeble exhalations, pro- ducing irritation and fever, until suffocation takes place, causing the malady in question ; and his sensa- tion of hindrance is caused by the hindrance to free respiration.
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