He became conscious very slowly. He looked at me, but I evidently conveyed no meaning to his mind. He seemed gradually to take in the details of the ward, and at last his eye fell upon the nurse. He recognized her, and after some little time said, with a smile, “Nurse, you never told me what you heard at the music hall last night.” I questioned him later as to any experience he may have had while in the operating theatre. He replied that, except for the first unpleasantness of breathing chloroform, he remembered nothing. He had dreamed nothing.
At a recent meeting (1922) of the British Medical Association at Glasgow Sir William MacEwen reports an even more remarkable case of a man who was brought into the hospital as “dead.” He had ceased to breathe before admission. An operation upon the brain was performed without the use of an anæsthetic of any kind. During the procedure artificial respiration was maintained. The man recovered consciousness and, looking round with amazement at the operating theatre and the strange gathering of surgeons, dressers and nurses, broke his death-like silence by exclaiming, “What’s all this fuss about?” It is evident from cases such as these that no light upon the mystery is likely to be shed by the testimony of those who have even advanced so far as to reach at least the borderland of the “undiscovered country.”
I might conclude this fragment with some comment on the Fear of Death. The dread of death is an instinct common to all humanity. Its counterpart is the instinct of self-preservation, the resolve to live. It is not concerned with the question of physical pain or distress, but is the fear of extinction, a dread of leaving the world, with its loves, its friendships and its cherished individual affairs, with perhaps hopes unrealized and projects incomplete. It is a dread of which the young know little. To them life is eternal.
The adventure is before them. Death and old age are as far away as the blue haze of the horizon. It is about middle age that the realization dawns upon men that life does not last for ever and that things must come to an end. As the past grows vaster and more distant and the future lessens to a mere span, the dread of death diminishes, so that in extreme old age it may be actually welcomed.