A PHYSICIAN ON DEATH.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1774, 7 March 1906, Page 22

A PHYSICIAN ON DEATH.

In a small work just published, containing extracts from the AA'ritings of Dr. Osier, an eminent American physician, the following important testimony is given about the physical facts at death-beds“As a rule man dies as he had lived, uninfluenced practically by the thought of a future life. Bunyan could not understand the quiet, easy death of Mr Bad man, and took it as an incontestable sign of his damnation. The ideal death of Cornelius, so beautifully described by Erasmus, is rarely seen. In our modern life the educated man dies usually as did Mr Denner in Margaret Deland’s story— AVondering, but uncertain, generally unconscious and unconcerned. 1 have careful records of about 500 death-beds, studied particularly Avith reference to the modes od deatli and the sensations of dying. The latter alone concerns us here. Ninety suffered bo-dily pain and distress of one sort or another, 11 showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exultation, one bitter remorse). The great majority gaA'o no sign one AA’ay or the other; like their birth, their death Avas ‘a sleep and a forgetting.’ The preacher Avas right. In this matter man hath no pre-eminence over the beast ‘as the one dieth. so dietli the other.’ ”