§ 137. In Paris some cases have of late occurred, which have created much public uneasiness by the evidence they afforded of the defective organization of the service of the officers of health, and occasioned it recently to undergo an examination with the view to the adoption of better securities. It appears that, from a very early period, to satisfy the public solicitude, the law required the fact of the reality of a death to be verified by the personal visit and inspection of the Maire of the district of the city where the death had taken place. Subsequently, the Maires were allowed to delegate this duty to officers of their own nomination, persons qualified for the duties by a medical education, and who were called _Officiers de Santé_. But the appointments thus made by the Maires did not give public satisfaction; and in the year 1806 it was required that the persons appointed as “officiers de santé” by the Maires, should be chosen by them from amongst the doctors in medicine and surgery who were attached to the public hospitals. They appear, however, to have been mostly chosen without reference to public qualifications, from their own medical friends in private practice. This arrangement of appointing persons in private practice appears to have prevailed in other countries, and to have frustrated much of the benefits otherwise derivable from the institution. Thirty-five of these private practitioners are now appointed to perform the duty. Reports have gained ground that from negligent discharge of the duty, persons had even been buried alive, and that the verification had been given in cases of murder. On a recent commission of inquiry, the celebrated surgeon, M. Orfila, thus speaks of the necessity of the verification of the fact of the decease. “It is possible to be interred alive! Interments may take place after murder, committed with the knife or by means of poison, without a suspicion being created that the death has been occasioned by violence. Ignorance or malevolence may attribute to crime deaths that have occurred from natural causes!” After referring to ancient cases in which evidence was recorded of parties having been buried alive, he adduces the following recent instances of parties having been interred without due verification of the cause of death by the _Officier de Santé_:— “We all know the case of the death of the grocer in the Rue de la Paix, who died of poison by arsenic. The interment took place after the verification of the death. In about a month afterwards I was called upon to examine the body as to the poison. Although the putrefaction of the corpse of the person who was of a very full habit had been much advanced, I was enabled to discover the presence of the arsenic by which the crime had been perpetrated.