This was a flash of light to me. To be yet more sure of my discovery, I
examined a number of arms severed from the trunk; they showed the same
tendency. I even saw hands severed from the forearm; and, in spite of
this severing of the flexor muscles, the thumb still revealed this same
sign. Such persistence in the same fact could not allow of the shadow of
a doubt: I possessed the sign-language of death, the semeiotics of the
dead.
I rejoiced, foreseeing the service which this discovery would render
upon a battle-field, for instance, where more than one man risks being
buried alive. I divined, moreover, something of its artistic importance.
I then questioned my cousin and the other students present in regard to
the symptomatics of death, and I saw with surprise that, not only had
the expression of this phenomenon escaped them hitherto, but that they
had no exact and precise knowledge concerning this grave and important
question.
There remained, in order to complete my discovery and to deduce useful
results from it, to verify the symptom on the dying man. It was
important for me to know in what degree it might become manifest on the
approach of death.
My wishes were gratified as if by magic, for I was led from the school
of anatomy to that of clinical medicine. There a house-student, a friend
of my cousin, placed me beside a dying patient, and I examined with the
utmost attention the hands of the unhappy man struggling against the
clutches of inevitable death.
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