THE PHYSICAL FEAR OF DEATH.

Colonist, Volume LXI, Issue 15095, 11 June 1919, Page 2

THE PHYSICAL FEAR OF DEATH.

I (From the "New Zealand Medical Journal.") Montague- wrote, "Every clay travels towards death, thy last only arrives at it." The fear of death and the bondage : of the grave has disturbed the minus of ; till men in all ages, and few can realise that "life is but to do a day's work j honestly, and death, to come "home for i' a, day's wages when the sun goes down. J; i The sure prospect of the death agony ) fills the mind with dark forebodings and ;' fears, but "agony" in this sense means •a contest, and not, we believe, a painful , I one, except to the beholder. A passage ;!of Bacon's Essays goes to the root of • the matter; —"Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark; and as j'that natural fear in children is increased >.with tales, so is the other. Certainly »'the contemplation of death, as the I.; wages of sin, and passage to another l; world, is holy and religious; but the i ( fear of it, as a tribute due unto nature, ■is weak. You shall read in some of the ; friars' books of mortification that a man should think with himselr what tlie pain >-is_, if he have but his finger's end pross- ,' ed, or tortured, and thereby imagine : what the pains of death are when "the ; i whole body us corrupted and dissolved ; .'when many times, death passeih with < less pain than the torture of a limb —for j the most vital parts arc not the quick•;.est of sense; and by him that spake s. only as a philosopher and natural man, • jit was well said 'Pompa mortis magis , 'terret guam mors ipsa.7' Groans and ' convulsions, and a discoloured face, and i,friends weeping, 'and blacks and obsequies and the like, show death terrible." Bacon believed that death is no more painful than being born.; "The sweot<?st canticle is 'Nunc tlimittis' when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Death hath this also, that I it openest the gate to good fame and extinguisheth envy." The trappings of death susrsest that

it is a pamiul thing to die. The pains of disease also suggest the same thing, and so do the painful feelings of the bereaved. ' The whole subject is fully discussed in Mackenna's recent book on "The Adventure of Death," where cases are recorded in which the patient recovered from the respiratory struggles attended by agonising sounds and apparent signs of suffering associated with impending death, to record a complete freedom from pain, anxiety or fear. Death creates its own anodyne, the sensorium is blunted, and indeed the mind is at leisure from itself. "If I lind strength enough .to hold a. pen I would write down how easy and pleasant a thing it is to die," were the last words of William Hunter. This opinion is confirmed *by Sir Benjamin Brodie, the poet Coy.'per, who experienced no "pain ;wlfen he 'tried to= h^ng himself, by General Younghusband, who,when nearly killed in a motor accident, felt as little as an electric lamp when the current is switched off, by Sir William Gull, and by Sir James Paget. The change is usually most gentle in children and in the aged—a gradual somnolence passing by gradations into a deeper and deeper slumber, till "one brother embraces the other, ' and sleep is swallowed up in death. Milton, as Johnson puts it, died "by a quiet and silent expiration," and Pope died so quietly that the exact time was unobserved. John Wesley felt no T>nm from head to foot, but Tie realised Ins nature was exhaustea and,' would sink more and more. Death \s painless whatever may have been the disease which preceded it. It has Been well likened to the restful calm that falls upon the sea after the tumult of a wild storm.