Not many years ago, as I remember, a deal of deprecatory talk was in
evolution about a certain Governor of a Persian province, who was
said to have been boiled alive by order of the Shah. Our shouting and
shrilling in this matter were not altogether becoming, considering
whose progeny we are. It is not so very long since all the nations
of Europe practised boiling alive—commonly in oil, which was thought
to impart a fine discomfort to the person so unlucky as to be in the
cauldron. In England boiling was the legal punishment for poisoners for
a long time, beginning in 1531, in the reign of Henry VII. Among those
who suffered this discomfort was a man mentioned in the chronicle of
the Grey Friars, who was let down into the kettle by a chain until he
was done. He, however, was not boiled in oil—just plain. Some of the
items of an expense account relating to the execution of Friar Stone at
Canterbury are interesting in their homely way:
Paid 2 men that sat by the kettle and parboiled him 1s
To 3 men that carried his quarters to the gates and set them up 1s
For a woman that scoured the kettle 2d
With regard to that last item one cannot repress the flame of a
consuming curiosity to know if the scouring was done before or
afterward. If afterward, the poor woman seems to have been miserably
underpaid.
But call it a long time ago, protesting that the tendency to boil one
another has exhausted its impetus, or, if you please, worked itself
out of our clarifying blood. But the year 1790 is not so far back, and
burning at the stake probably generates an uneasiness to which that of
the oil-boiled gentry of the earlier period was nowise superior. It was
in the year mentioned—in the reign of his most gracious Majesty George,
the third of that name—that burning at the stake ceased to be the legal
penalty for “coining,” which was accounted “treason,” and murder of a
husband, which was “petty treason.” But wife-killers and coiners, male,
were hanged. The last woman burned alive departed this life, I think,
in 1789. Men are living to-day whose fathers were living then and may,
as children, have played in the ashes.
Still (it may be urged) it was not actually we who did it: in our
milder day we have neither the cauldron nor the stake. Ah, but we
have the dynamo. We have the custom of putting a small percentage of
our assassins into an “electrical chair” and doing them to death by
pressing a button—a process to which in defiance of two languages we
have given the name “electrocution.” For encouragement of the rising
young assassin, physicians assure us that this gives a painless death.
The physicians know nothing about it; for anything they know to the
contrary, death by electricity may be the most frightful torment that
it is possible for any of nature’s forces or processes to produce.
The agony may be not only inconceivably great, but to the sufferer it
may seem to endure for a period inconceivably long. That many of the
familiar physical indications of suffering are absent (though “long,
shuddering sighs” and “straining at the straps” are not certainly
symptoms of joy) is very little to the purpose when we know that
electricity paralyzes the muscles by whose action pain is familiarly
manifested. We know that it paralyzes all the seats of sensation, for
that matter, and puts an end to possibilities of pain. That is only to
say that it kills. But by what secret and infernal pang may not all
this be accompanied or accomplished? Through what unnatural exaltation
of the senses may not the moment of its accomplishing be commuted into
unthinkable cycles of time? Of all this the physicians can have no more
knowledge than so many toads under stones.
It is probable, at least it is possible, that a “victim’s” sum of
suffering from his instantaneous pervasion with enough of the fluid
to kill him is no less than if it were leisurely rilled through him
a little faster than he could bear until he should die of it that
way. Theories of the painlessness of sudden death appear to be based
mostly upon the fact that those who undergo it make no entries of their
sensations in their diaries. It is to be wished that they would be more
thoughtful and less selfish. The man smitten by lightning, or widely
distributed by a hitch in the proceedings at a powder mill, owes a duty
to his fellow men of which he commonly appears to have but an imperfect
sense. A careful and analytic record of his sensations at every
stage of his mischance would be a precious contribution to medical
literature. Published under some such title as _A Diary of Sudden
Death; by a Public-Spirited Observer on the Inside_ it would serve many
useful purposes, and also profit the publisher. What we most need—next
to more doctors at executions—is some person having experience of the
matter, to tell us fairly in inoffensive English, interlarded with
“Soche-sorte Latin as physickers doe use,” just how it feels to be dead
all over at once.