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

  • George Catlin
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    His dreamy recollections of the seemingly begin- ning of a new and strange existence, appear to him to have passed over a long time, though the spasm lasted but a minute, or a minute and a half (as long as a man can live without breathing), and in most cases to have lasted a few minutes longer, death would have been the consequence. How awful to be so near to death, and so often ! He wakes suddenly, and con- vulsed, as if shaken: he feels as if snatched from the jaws of a monster that was devouring him—and what has saved his life? Nothing but the instant rallying—• the death-struggle of his abused and sleeping lungs raising him upon his heels and elbows, when he wakes with the tocsin ringing in his ears—c Hying mortal! moisten your lips and your throat, and shut your mouth, or death is at the door! ’ How many will recognize this picture, and yet how few will properly appreciate the danger they have It is a well-known fact that persons in the habit of sleeping with their mouths open are subject to con- tinual and frequent attacks of the nightmare • and if each of these attacks is the leginning of death, certainly their repetition must be tending to an ending in death. Many constitutions are strong enough to bear these shocks for a long time; but all men, and all women, subject to them in an aggravated form, exhibit sys-