Death and sudden death / by P. Brouardel.

  • Paul Brouardel
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Death and sudden death / by P. Brouardel. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    56/280 (page 52)
    A method of recognizing death has been borrowed from the saleswomen at the markets. When these women buy a fowl or a fish, they look at its eye ; it shows a speck on the sclerotic which gives the eye the appearance of parchment, and this is ail the more plainly visible the longer the time that has elapsed since death. A man dies with his eyes half shut, and an attendant closes them completely. If the lids had remained open, you would see that the conjunctiva and sclerotic presented a very characteristic brown hue. M. Larcher,* of Passy, has insisted strongly on this sign. Allow me to say a word or two about a plan that was urged on a particular occasion, and which made some stir in forensic medicine. It was suggested that in persons dying suddenly the eye preserved the impression of objects which were in front of it. Photographs of the retina of a person supposed to hâve been murdered were shown to the Society of Legal Medicine. It is said that these photo- graphs reproduced the figures of a man and dog in the act of springing and making the attack to which the individual had succumbed.i' These images, which were said to be so clear, were really extraordinarily vague, and yet in his report, M. Vernois was quite positive about them. Kühne of Heidelberg has repeated the experiment. I hâve seen some of his photographs, and some of them are very distinct. He placed a grating in front of a rabbit, then killed the animal rapidly and removed its eye, exposed the retina and photographed it. In the print the transverse and vertical bars of the grating may be recognized. He has endeavoured also to reproduce a fence and a chair ; but even when set in the full sunshine these objects gave only very indistinct images. Many obstacles besides stand in the way of these experi- mental results ever having a practical use in forensic medi- cine; the animal must, as a matter of fact, be killed rapidly, and the retina must be photographed immediately after death. These conditions are hardly to be realized in forensic * Larcher, ‘De la Rigidité cadavérique et d’un nouveau Signe de le Mort (Tache scléroticale) ’ {A?m. cTHyg.^ 1869, tome xxxi., p. 468). f Vernois, ‘ Application de la Photographie à la Médecine légale : Rapport sur une communication de M. le Dr. Bourion’ {Ann. d'Hyg., 1870, tome xxxiii., p. 239).