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Book Review |
Apoplexia and Lethargus
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Death casts a shadow over words like stupor and coma. They do not inspire optimism either in literature or in everyday experience. Coma, transcribed directly from the Greek 
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, was associated with death in the writings of Hippocrates. Johann Wepfer (1620–93), credited with the first demonstration of the association between apoplexy and cerebral haemorrhage, gave a vivid and oft-quoted account of the coma preceding the death of the first case in his Historiae Apoplecticorum (1658): ‘... the Abbot ... found him prostrate upon the ground, insensible to shouts, to shaking and pinching of the body, the same in the trunk, senseless’. In his novel Clayhanger, Arnold Bennett describes the prolonged illness and slow death of Darius, his Cheyne-Stokes respiration and his withdrawal ‘into some fastness more recondite than sleep’. Stupor, with the same Latin root as stupidity, but usually less persistent, was referred to by Macaulay in recording
Formerly of University of Newcastle upon Tyne