Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1884-05-02
tion I an treating of has been thor
ougghlyinvestigsted-]

WAoA0s
"Many Of these dead bodies) lay in
extraordinary attitudes, some with their
arms raised rigidly in the air, some with
legs drawn up and fixed. In not a few
the trunk was curved forwards and
fixed These attitudes, in a word, were
not those of the relaxation of death, but
were rather of a seemingly active char
acter, dependent apparently upon a
final muscular action at the last moment
of life, in the spasm of which the muscles
set and remain rigid and inflexible. The
death, in the majority of these cases, had
resulted from chest-wounds, in fewer
instances from shots through the head
and abdomen. The latter were accom-
panied by considerable hemorrhage, as
was evident from the pools of dark-col-
ored blood by the side of the bodies.
These examinations were made about
thirty-six hours after death and also
later"
The three following. cases related by
DR.. Brinton, and furnished to him by
some friends, are most remarkable:
A detail of United States soldiers, for
aging near Goldsboro', N. c., came
suddenly upon a party Of Southern a v
airy dismounted. The latter immedi-
ately sprang to their saddles and, after
. volley had been fired at them, they all
but one rode away. That one was left
standing with n foot in the stirrup;
one hand, the left, grasping the bridle-
rein and name of his horse, the right
hand clenching the barrel OF his carbine
near the muzzle, the but of the carbine
resting on the ground. The mans head
was turned over his right shoulder, ap-
parently watching the approach of the
attacking party. Some of the latter
were about to fire a second time, but
were restrained by the officer in charge,
who directed them to advance and take
the Southern soldier alive. In the
meantime he was called upon to surren-
der, without response. Upon a near
approach and examination he was found
to be rigid in death. in the singular atti-
tude above described. Great difficulty
was experienced in forcing the name Of
the horse from his left hand and the
carbine from his right. When the body
vas laid upon the ground, the limbs
still retained the same position and the
same flexibility. This man had been
struck by two balls, each from a United
States Springfield rifle; one entered the
body at the right side of the spine, and
emerging near the region of the heart,
denied the saddle-skirt and dropped
upon the ground. The other entered
at the right temple, and had no appar-
ent exit. The horse had remained quiet,
being fastened by a halter.
Another incident is the following:
At the battle of Williamsburg, DR.. T.
b. Reed examined the body Of q United
States Zouave, who had been shot di-
rectly through the forehead, as he was
climbing v a low fence. His, too,
was the last attitude in life; on leg half
over the fence, the body crouching
backward. One hand, partially clenched
and raised to the level of the forehead,
presented the palm forward, as if to
ward off an approaching evil.
Again, DIR. Henry Sti1le, while seated
on the top Of a freight-car on the Nash
vile & Chattanooga Railroad, saw a
brakeman instantaneously killed by a
shot between the eyes, fired by a
guerilla from the woods through which
the train was passing. The murdered
man was screwing down the brakes at
the moment of the shot. After death
the body remained fixed, the arms
rigidly extended on the wheel of the
brake. The pipe which he had been
smoking remained still clasped between
his teeth. So perfect was the rigidity,
and so tight was the clasp of the hands,
that the body wa with difficulty olsen
gagged from its @post-mortem position.
The conservation of the last attitude
car take place in other circumstances
than sudden death from wounds to the
brain, the heart or the lungs, although
an injury to a vital organ is the most
frequent cause of that phenomenon.
DR.. Brinton has seen it produced by
wounds of the abdomen, and DR..
Armand in M case found it caused by
a wound Of the thigh. But it does not
appear only in cases of death from a
wound. 1t wa observed in a terrible
accident, which occurred in London, in
January, 1867, when forty-one persons
who were skating on the large pond of
Regents Park persisted from a sudden
breaking of the ice. The following ex-
tract from the London Times. is full of
interest:
1.-The attitude of most of those taken
out of the water has proved a topic of
conversation among medical men. In
nearly every case the arms were ele-
waited, sometimes with the elbows
cramped to the sides, in others with the
elbows squared and projecting as if in
the act of skating. The inference is
that those poor people supported them
selves by their arms upon the ice, not
daring to trust to their hands, and that,
when finally they dropped back ex-
hausted, they died less OF actual drown
ing than of cold and terror, and so re-
tanned the position in which they had
been found"
Already DR.. Taylor had mentioned
the case of an individual who had. for a
long time, kept his arms extended tc
try to escape submersion, and in whom
those limbs after death were found rigid
in that same position.
1t appears that carbonic acid can
produce the peculiar kind of rigidity Of
muscles that keeps the trunk and limbs
in the attitude in which the last action
OF the will has placed them.
In 1882 DR.. Won Graefe, in the Pyr
mont grotto, saw the corpse Of a young
man who bad willfully destroyed hi
life, by remaining in the poisonous at