who should find her. When found her feet were frozen and she was insensible. She died on the way to the hospital. Murder by cold is more common, but can, of course, be done only on the helpless, as in cases of newborn infants. Accidental cases of death by cold are not frequent in the temperate latitudes. The duration of exposure to cold necessary for the production of death is extremely variable. At the Paris morgue, where the temperature is kept at about 0° F. during the day, and 18° F. during the night, the time necessary for freezing the body stiff is about twenty-four hours.5

If marks of violence be found upon the body, they must be judged according to the rules already laid down in the chapter on wounds. If necessarily mortal, the influence of cold need not be considered; but in all other cases it is obvious that cold must have greatly accelerated the fatal result. The same remarks are applicable when the subject is very young. It must be remembered, however, that cold itself may here be more readily employed as a homicidal agent, and that possibly the other marks of ill-treatment may be few or none. An atrocious case of murder by cold has been frequently quoted, on account of the rarity of examples of the kind. A man and his wife, at Lyons, were tried for the murder of their daughter, a girl aged eleven, under the following circumstances. On the 28th of

December, at a time when there was a severe degree of cold, the female prisoner compelled the deceased to get out of her bed, and place herself in a vessel of ice-cold water. The deceased complained of exhaustion and dimness of sight; the prisoner then threw a pail of iced-water upon her head, soon after which the child expired."

'Vibert, Précis de Méd. Lég.

Ann. d'Hyg., 1831, p. 207.

CHAPTER V.

ELECTRICITY AND LIGHTNING.

I. ELECTRICITY.

319. In general.

320. Conditions determining effect.

321. Accidents.

322. Suicide.

323. Electrocution.

324. Post-mortem lesions.

II. LIGHTNING.

325. In general.

326. Effects.

327. External lesions.

328. Post-mortem findings.

329. Cases.

I. ELECTRICITY.

319. In general. The recent introduction of electricity of high voltage into general commercial use has brought with it a number of accidents and fatalities. Electric power, as supplied commonly, is either the direct current, with a voltage of 110 to 550, or the alternating current, with a voltage of 1,100 to 6,000, or even as high as 60,000, for long distance transmission, as from plants like that at Niagara Falls. The alternations commonly vary from 25 to 100 per second. These currents are transformed to the desired potential (usually low) at the destination. Street cars are generally run on a current with a voltage of about 550; motors at voltages varying from 110 to 550, according to the local conditions; houses are supplied with incandescent lights at a voltage of 110, either direct or alternating. Arc lamps are commonly run by direct current, the voltage depending upon the number of lamps in the circuit, sometimes being as high as 5,000 volts. Telephones and telegraphs are operated at a comparatively low voltage, and such a small amperage as practically never to cause an accident.

Injuries from these currents usually come with the high voltages; but the alternating current, even of low voltage, is much more dangerous than the direct current. Exception, however, must be made of

the exceedingly rapid alternating currents of Tesla and d'Arsonval with which currents of from 10,000 to 40,000 volts may be applied to the body without any effect. The alternations of these currents are about 10,000 to 20,000 per second.1

320. Conditions determining effect. Another point, too, must be taken into consideration, and that is the resistance to the current offered by the body. This resistance is dependent upon the efficiency of the contact between the electrical conductor and the body, and the condition of the surface of the body. If the body surface is moistened with perspiration, or by any saline solution, the body receives much more of the current than if the skin is perfectly dry. Again, the resistance of the body depends upon the portion of the body that the current traverses. If the current passes through the entire body it naturally encounters much more resistance than if it traverses merely one hand. Hence, to say how much effect a certain current may have upon the body we must know not merely the character of the current, but also the conditions of the body, and the part of the body that it passes through; and then we can estimate but roughly the effect which the current will have. In a series of experiments on animals to determine the best method of executing criminals, the committee appointed by the state of New York reported2 results which showed that dogs weighing from 10 to 90 pounds had a resistance varying (not in proportion to their weights) from 3,600 to 30,000 ohms; and in one case of a dog weighing 371⁄2 pounds a resistance of 200,000 ohms. These dogs were killed with alternating currents lasting only an instant, or of but a few seconds' duration, the voltage of the currents being from 800 to 140 volts in the various cases; while in the dogs exposed to the direct current, one with a resistance of only 6,000 remained unhurt after exposure to seven shocks with a voltage of from 1,000 to 1,420 volts, and a seventh exposure of two and one half seconds to a current of 1,200 volts. The dog of 200,000 ohms resistance withstood the direct current of 304 volts for thirty seconds, and the alternating current of 100 volts for sixty-five seconds. The resistance of the human body may be roughly estimated at 10,000 ohms; but this is subject to great variations, and with these variations the dangers from electric currents vary. It may be reduced, as in electrocutions, to 200 or 300 ohms.

'See Biraud's thesis, Lyons, 1892, 'See The Medico-Legal Journal, New La Mort et les Accidents Causés par York, 1889, p. 200. Compare also Journ. les Courants Electriques de Haute Amer. Med. Assoc., 1895, Vol. XXV., p. Tension. 283.

321. Accidents.- Accidents from electricity most often occur, naturally, among those working with electrical machinery and wires, and the injuries received are of great range, from slight burns to marked nervous effects or instantaneous death. The following are instances of recovery from injuries due to high voltage currents that are ordinarily considered mortal. Donnellan3 reports the case of a man, forty years of age, who grasped the ends of a wire carrying 1,000 volts. He was rendered immediately unconscious and remained in profound coma for a half hour, until seen by the physician, when his face was pale and bathed in perspiration. Forty minutes after the contact he vomited and then became wildly delirious, so that it took the efforts of three men to hold him in bed. He moaned and cried incoherently and had severe convulsions, rapidly repeated, in spite of morphin. After a couple of hours of convulsions he fell into a sleep from which he awoke four hours later, dazed and sore all over. The next day he had recovered except for the burns on his arms and legs along the lines where the wires had been in contact with the clothing, but the clothing showed no signs of scorching.

Mr. Smurthwaite gives an account of a man admitted to the infirmary in a semiconscious condition, suffering from severe burns of the hands and thigh. The man, who had a large bunch of keys in his pocket, was leaning with his right thigh against an unprotected brass fitting, adjusting the brushes on a motor with his right hand when he felt the shock. A fellow workman heard himn shout, and running to him, found him fixed to the machine in a condition of tetanic spasm, his back bent in the position of opisthotonos. On being knocked off the machine by his fellow workmen, he lay on the ground as if stunned, for about ten minutes, when he slightly moved his eyelids, but could not speak. There was a large hole burnt in his trousers over the pocket in which the keys were. The keys themselves had the appearance as if they had just been taken out of a hot furnace. There was a burn on his thigh of a peculiar shape; about the center of the wound there were a number of depressions which evidently corresponded to the heads of the keys, and for about two inches round this burn the skin was very much swollen and of a dusky red color. The right hand was burned very severely. On the second day the first phalanx of the thumb and the first finger had to be amputated. The circuit which caused the injury was of 2,150 volts.

'Donnellan, Medical News, Philadelphia, 1894.

Smurthwaite, Brit. Med. Journ., 1901, Vol. I., p. 573.

Hedley reports the case of an electrical engineer, who accidentally put himself in circuit with a 3,000 volt circuit while he was standing on a chair. He said that the first thing he realized was that he was standing on the floor. He had no clear idea whether he jumped off or was knocked off. His forearm was drawn up to his chest, and the hand clenched. All power of movement below the elbow was absolutely lost, but the arm at the shoulder could be moved. He felt pulsations in time with the alternations of the current (83 periods per second) from a little above the elbow down, which gradually became less violent and the motor power in the forearm gradually returned. In three minutes he felt "none the worse." But ten minutes later there was a sensation of burning on the fingers, where examination showed that there was a burn. There was no other effect except that the man expressed himself as feeling decidedly better in general health. An estimation of the voltage to which the man's body was subjected was conservatively placed at 2,500 volts, his body resistance at 10,000 ohms, and the current at 0.25 amperes.

The following case is significant from the fatal result following an ordinary 100-volt alternating lighting current. A carpenter kneeling on a gas pipe while doing some repairing in an attic, accidentally touched the back of his head against a denuded wire running to a droplight. The day was hot and the man perspired freely. His clothes were saturated with sweat. The man gave a slight outcry, a convulsion, and stretched out in opisthotonos. A companion removed him fifteen to thirty seconds later, and in so doing got a shock from handling the wire. The man gasped a few times only, and then was dead. The only injury was a slight burn 3/16 of an inch wide and 212 inches long, over the occiput, scarcely going through the cuticle. The city electrician said that the charge was that of an ordinary lighting current for individual or chandelier lights,-100 volts, from a 50 cycle, 6,000 alternation system.

322. Suicide. In this connection may be mentioned a singular case of suicide of a man who deliberately took hold of the conductors of a dynamo electrical machine at the works of M. Chertemps, in Paris, and was instantly killed.

323. Electrocution.- Electrocution was adopted as the legal mode of executing criminals in New York state in 1888, in Ohio in 1896, and in Massachusetts recently, as being more humane than hanging

Hedley, Lancet, London, Dec. 5, Med. Asso., Oct., 1903, Vol. XLI., p. 1896, p. 1 630. 967. ⚫Van Zwaluwenburg, Journ. Amer.