Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [78]
"This dog may do more to save Kemmler's life than all his lawyers," Cockran said.6
DASH WAS the sentimental favorite of the Kemmler hearings. Amid all the testimony regarding dog-killing experiments, the spectators were 177 relieved to hear the story of a dog whose owners loved him and cared whether he lived or died. The dog also raised a scientific question. Kemmler's lawyers suspected that many of the dogs experimented upon at the Edison laboratory had merely been stunned, like Dash, and that the true agent of death had been the dissecting knife.
These matters had a peculiar resonance in the summer of 1889. A few months earlier a famous mind reader named Washington Irving Bishop had fallen unconscious during a Manhattan performance. Later that night doctors pronounced him dead and conducted an autopsy. They overlooked the note that Bishop always carried explaining that he was prone to deathlike, cataleptic trances and warning doctors to be cautious in pronouncing him dead. Bishop's wife charged that her husband had been murdered by dissection, and a prolonged scandal ensued.7
The Bishop episode revealed lingering uncertainties in the definition of death. At the end of the nineteenth century the fear of premature burial was still common, and doctors constantly created new ways to check for signs of life. Pulse and breath were still thought to be the most unequivocal evidence, but determining whether these functions had ceased proved difficult. Suspecting that breath might not be detected by the old method of holding a mirror to the nose, physicians submerged corpses in water to check for bubbles. Notwithstanding the availability of the stethoscope, some thought opening an artery was a better way to check for motion of the blood. Even in the 1880s some physicians checked for life by burning the skin, jabbing a needle into the heart, or applying a "nipple pincher." A few still insisted that the only sure sign of death was putrefaction.8
If death eluded definition even in normal circumstances, the added element of electricity—the force long linked to the spark of life—confused matters further. Victims of accidental shocks, like those of drowning or strangulation, had been known to revive. Many feared that electrical execution would simply stun its victims and fail to kill.9
Dr. Frederick Peterson, the eminent neurologist who had assisted at the Edison laboratory experiments and who had done more research on electrical killing than any other physician, was called to testify. He explained that after he cut open one of the dogs killed by electricity, its heart continued to beat for thirty-six minutes.
"You considered this dog dead?" one of Kemmler's lawyers asked with surprise.
"Certainly," Dr. Peterson replied. "That is not an uncommon thing."
"So, if you cut a man, or human being, open, and found his heart beating, you would continue the examination, regardless of the fact that his heart was beating?"
"Yes, if I thought he was dead."
"And his heart could be beating, and he be dead?"
"Yes, I think so."10
The referee pursued the line of questioning.
"How does death result from electricity?" he asked Dr. Peterson.
"That is not known."
"How does it result from hanging?"
"By cutting—either breaking the spinal cord or cutting the vertebrae, or by injuring the spinal cord, or by suffocation."
"And in the application of electricity you do not know how it is caused?"
"We know that breathing ceases, and that the heart will stop beating also," Dr. Peterson explained. "We say death results from that—but why those things stop we do not know."11
Witnesses expressed many opinions as to how electricity killed. Brown explained that men receiving shocks died either from "blows delivered to the nerves," "paralysis of the heart," or decomposition of the blood through the process of electrolysis.12
Elbridge Gerry said electricity "would cause death by an instantaneous paralysis of the