[Dr. Richardson was an English physician of uncommon
originality and ability. He founded and for some years edited
the _Journal of Public Health_, chiefly directed toward the
prevention of disease. In 1875 he created widespread interest
by sketching an imaginary "Model City of Health" to be called
Hygeia. He wrote several important books; from "The Diseases
of Modern Life," published by D. Appleton & Co., New York,
are taken the extracts which follow.]
By the strict law of Nature a man should die as unconscious of his death
as of his birth.
Subjected at birth to what would be, in the after-conscious state, an
ordeal to which the most cruel of deaths were not possibly more severe,
he sleeps through the process, and only upon the subsequent awakening
feels the impressions, painful or pleasant, of the world into which he
is delivered. In this instance the perfect law is fulfilled because the
carrying of it out is retained by Nature herself: human free-will and
the caprice that springs from it have no influence.
By the hand of Nature death were equally a painless portion. The cycle
of life completed, the living being sleeps into death when Nature has
her way.
This purely painless process, this descent by oblivious trance into
oblivion, this natural physical death, is the true Euthanasia; and it is
the duty of those we call physicians to secure for man such good health
as shall bear him in activity and happiness onward in his course to this
goal. For Euthanasia, though it be open to every one born of every race,
is not to be had by any save through obedience to those laws which it is
the mission of the physician to learn, to teach, and to enforce.
Euthanasia is the sequel of health, the happy death engrafted on the
perfect life.
When the physician has taught the world how this benign process of
Nature may be secured, and the world has accepted the lesson, death
itself will be practically banished; it will be divested equally of
fear, of sorrow, of suffering. It will come as a sleep.
If you ask me what proof there is of the possibility of such a
consummation, I point to our knowledge of the natural phenomena of one
form of dissolution revealed to us even now in perfect, though
exceptional, illustration. We have all seen Nature, in rare instances,
vindicating herself despite the social opposition to her, and showing
how tenderly, how soothingly, how like a mother with her foot on the
cradle, she would, if she were permitted, rock us all gently out of the
world. How, if the free-will with which she has armed us were brought
into accord with her designs, she would give us the riches, the
beauties, the wonders of the Universe for our portion so long as we
could receive and enjoy them; and at last would gently withdraw us from
them, sense by sense, with such imperception that the pain of the
withdrawal would be unfelt and indeed unknown.
Ten times in my own observation I remember witnessing, with attentive
mind, these phenomena of natural Euthanasia. Without pain, anger,
or sorrow, the intellectual faculties of the fated man lose their
brightness. Ambition ceases, or sinks into desire for repose. Idea of
time, of space, of duty, lingeringly pass away. To sleep and not to
dream is the pressing and, step by step, still pressing need; until at
length it whiles away nearly all the hours. The awakenings are shorter
and shorter; painless, careless, happy awakenings to the hum of a busy
world, to the merry sounds of children at play, to the sound of voices
offering aid; to the effort of talking on simple topics and recalling
events that have dwelt longest on the memory; and then again the
overpowering sleep. Thus on and on, until at length, the intellectual
nature lost, the instinctive and merely animal functions, now no longer
required to sustain the higher faculties, in their turn succumb and
fall into inertia.
This is death by Nature, and when mankind has learned the truth, when
the time shall come--as come it will--that "there shall be no more an
infant of days, nor an old man who hath not filled his days," this
act of death, now, as a rule, so dreaded because so premature, shall,
arriving only at its appointed hour, suggest no terror, inflict no
agony.
The sharpness of death removed from those who die, the poignancy of
grief would be almost equally removed from those who survive, were
natural Euthanasia the prevailing fact. Our sensibilities are governed
by the observance of natural law and the breach of it. It is only when
nature is vehemently interrupted that we either wonder or weep. Thus the
old Greeks, fathers of true mirth, who looked upon prolonged grief as an
offence, and attached the word madness to melancholy,--even they were so
far imbued with sorrow when the child or the youth died, that they bore
the lifeless body to the pyre in the break of the morning, lest the sun
should behold so sad a sight as the young dead; while we, who court
rather than seek to dismiss melancholy, who find poetry and piety in
melancholic reverie, and who indulge too often in what, after a time,
becomes the luxury of woe, experience a gradation of suffering as we
witness the work of death. For the loss of the child and the youth we
mourn in the perfect purity of sorrow; for the loss of the man in his
activity we feel grief mingled with selfish regret that so much that was
useful has ceased to be. In the loss of the aged, in their days of
second childishness and mere oblivion, we sympathize for something that
has passed away, and for a moment recall events saddening to the memory;
but how soon this consoling thought succeeds and conquers--that the race
of the life that has gone was run, and that for its own sake the
dispensation of its removal was most merciful and most wise.
To the rule of natural death there are a few exceptions. Unswerving in
her great purpose for the universal good, Nature has imposed on the
world of life her storms, earthquakes, lightnings, and all those sublime
manifestations of her supreme power which, in the infant days of the
universe, cowed the boldest and implanted in the human heart fears and
superstitions which in hereditary progression have passed down even to
the present generations. Thus she has exposed us all to accidents of
premature death, but, with infinite wisdom, and as if to tell us that
her design is to provide for these inevitable calamities, she has given
a preponderance of number at birth to those of her children who by
reason of masculine strength and courage shall have most frequently to
face her elements of destruction. Further, she has provided that death
by her, by accidental collision with herself shall, from its very
quickness, be freed of pain. For pain is a product of time. To
experience pain the impression producing it must be transmitted from the
injured part of the living body to the conscious centre, must be
received at the conscious centre, and must be recognized by the mind as
a reception; the last act in truth being the conscious act. In the great
majority of deaths from natural accidents there is not sufficient time
for the accomplishment of these progressive steps by which the
consciousness is reached. The unconsciousness of existence is the first
and last fact inflicted upon the stricken organism: the destruction is
so mighty, that the sense of it is not revealed.
The duration of time intended by Nature to extend between the birth of
the individual and his natural Euthanasia is undetermined, except in an
approximate degree. From the first, the steady, stealthy attraction of
the earth is ever telling upon the living body. Some force liberated
from the body during life enables it, by self-controlled resistance, to
overcome its own weight. For a given part of its cycle the force
produced is so efficient, that the body grows as well as moves by its
agency against weight; but this special stage is limited to an extreme,
say, of thirty years. There is then another period, limited probably
also to thirty years, during which the living structure in its full
development maintains its resistance to its weight. Finally, there comes
a time when this resistance begins to fail, so that the earth, which
never for a moment loses her grasp, commences and continues to prevail,
and after a struggle, extended from twenty to thirty years, conquers,
bringing the exhausted organism which has daily approached nearer and
nearer to her dead self, into her dead bosom.
Why the excess of power developed during growth or ascent of life should
be limited as to time; why the power that maintains the developed body
on the level plain should be limited as to time; why the power should
decline so that the earth should be allowed to prevail and bring descent
of life, are problems as yet unsolved. We call the force that resists
the earth Vital. We say it resists death; we speak of it as stronger in
the young than in the old; but we know nothing more of it really, from a
physical point of view, than that while it exists it opposes terrestrial
weight sufficiently to enable the body to move with freedom on the
surface of the earth.
These facts we accept as ultimate facts. To say that the animal is at
birth endowed with some reserve force, something over and above what it
obtains from food and air, would seem a reasonable conclusion; but we
have no proofs that it is true, save that the young resist better than
the old. We must therefore rest content with our knowledge in its simple
form, gathering from it the lesson that death, a part of the scheme of
life, is ordained upon a natural term of life, is beneficially planned,
"is rounded with a sleep."
[Then follow chapters on disease, leading up to rules for health.]