distended with fluid. The state of the larger blood-vessels should be attentively inspected, for in persons advanced in life there appears to be a strong disposition to disease in the internal carotid and basilary arteries. The great importance of minutely inspecting every part of the brain cannot be too frequently, or too forcible urged, in cases of forensic inquiry. The instances already recorded (page 16) are sufficient to sanction this assertion; and to these, we may add the following illustration which is to be found in the article Cas Rares of the Dictionnaire des Sciences Medicales, by M. Fournier, who was called upon for his opinion in a case of alleged murder at Brussels.[1] The deceased had quarrelled with another man, some blows had been interchanged, and he had died a fortnight afterwards, emaciated and completely exhausted. Two of the lowest order of practitioners in France, officiers de Santé, as they are called, inspected the body, and pronounced that death had taken place in consequence of the blows. M. Fournier discovered an extensive suppuration in the brain, with a very carious state of the inner surface of the cranium, and learnt that the deceased had been afflicted with head-aches for twenty years. He therefore declared it to be his opinion, that the man had died of a disease of long standing. In this opinion we concur, but it is not equally clear that the crisis was not accelerated by the violence which he had sustained.[2]
We ought not to quit the examination of the head, until we have examined the base of the cranium, in
- ↑ The reader will also be very much amused by the account of the dissection of Charles II, and of the appearances which supported the idea of his having died from poison. Burnett's Hist. of his own times, vol. ii, p. 230.
- ↑ The case of John Lees, which formed the subject of the Oldham inquest, appears in this respect to have borne some analogy; see also the case related by Baron Larey, p. 15.
