Phillipsburg herald. [volume] (Phillipsburg, Kan.) 1882-1905, 1888-08-31
- Death b. FIectrfeftE.

Ao5 IA Dcl-t- ~ A1AUoEA4GAlIo
Or. Richardson in ''Aselepiad.''
While executions still continue
there is nothing in the present and
IOng-established plan of carrying
them out which needs to be changed.
If the process be considered brutal,
it is not more brutal than the spirit
Of the act itself, all attempts to re
fine which cannot add to it's eff
cacY as a deterrent of crime. The
process Of hanging looks brutal with
out actually being so. Since the age
OF MOrgagni the question now under
discussion has been considered, and
the opinion of the best-infOrmed
Psychologists, then and since then,
has always been that death by
strangulatiOn, or by suspension, is
practically q painless mode Of death.
Persons who have recovered from
the Inconsistencies produced by
strangulatiOn have testified com
pletely on this point, and that the
old and legal method of death by
suspension, according to the terms
of the judicial sentence, should, at
the instance Of any ignorant and
common officer who may carry out
the sentence, have ever been changed
for the long drop, or death by an
eXcruciating and cruel blow, is in
credible. Some member of the house
OF commons ought to put the secre-
tary of state for the home depart
ment, who is charged with the duty
of directing that the law, be it good
or bad, shall be carried out, the
question why the gentle, though it
may seem prolonged, extinction of
life by hanging should not be re-
stored. While death is the national
punishment for murder, this nation
al mode of indicating the law is al
so the most rational. Making the
method of execution more scientific,
If it be right to degrade science by
so connecting her civilizing powers
with such degrading and ignorant
work, is simply to put premium
on crime itself.
Since 1 set up a lethal chamber for
the painless extinction of the lives OF
the lower animals / have more than
once met persons, not Strictly insane,
but in morbid states of mind, who
have looked on the lethal easy death
invitingly pleasant that if such mode
Of death were to be adopted as the
national plan of capital murder they
would not hesitate in some Of their
worst moods to kill that they might
be killed, since the seVerest fate that
could happen would be q death
brought to the painlessness Of pleas
ure. Death by the electric shock
would convey to minds of this stamp
the same anticipation, but would not
necessarily produce the same certain
result. In some researches on the ap-
phcatiOn of the electric discharge for
the painless extinction of the lives OF
animals to be used as food, the de
tails of which l recorded in the Medi-
cal Times and Gazette for the year
1869, this mode of death was any
thing but certain in it's effects.
Sheep stricken apparently into in
slant and irreVOcable death by cleo
tricity after q few minutes showed
| signs of life, and if they had not been
dispatched in the ordinary way by
| the knife would have been restored to
| consciousness. The same fact has
! been observed in attempts to kill dogs
/ by the electric shock, and I once pub
lshed an instance in which a large
dog, struck into perfect unconscious
| ness by the stroke from a powerful
! battery, was submitted to a surgical
/ operation which lying, to all appear
! ances, dead, and was as yet so little
| affected as to make an easy and
| sound recovery. 1t need not be in
/ ferred from such facts as these that
/ tho nlnotTsio obncl~ will NOT kill af Onn
discharge; in most cases it viii; but,
exceptionally, instead of killing out
right, it viii simply stun, and may
| induce the semblance of death in
! stead OF the real death.