Haller tells of a man who, in stepping over a grave, imagined himself seized by the foot, and died the same day; others have died from fear on the day predicted as the day of their death, and some have fallen down dead at the moment they were condemned to death. Haller had already noticed that fear could arrest the action of the heart and profoundly modify the circulation of the blood: _hæmorrhagias supprimit, et menses, et lac, viresque ad venerem necessarias frangit_. Surgeons well know how fatal a violent shock to the nervous system from traumatic or moral causes may prove to their patients. In such cases the medulla oblongata is so depressed in its activity that chloroformisation is sufficient to arrest the action of the heart and respiration. Porta, the great surgeon of the University of Pavia, when his patients died under an operation, used to throw his knife and instruments contemptuously to the ground, and shout in a tone of reproach to the corpse: '_Cowards die from fear_.’ My friend Lauder Brunton, professor of medicine at the hospital of Saint Bartholomew, in London, published the following fact a few years ago.[33] An assistant had made himself odious to the students of a certain college; a body of them, therefore, resolved to give him a fright. They put ready a block and an axe in a dark room, then seized the man and led him before a few students dressed in black, who officiated as judges. When he saw these preparations he took it for a joke, but the students assured him that all was meant in earnest, and that he must prepare for death, for he should presently be beheaded. They bound his eyes, forced him to his knees, and bent his head on the block. While one of them made a noise by brandishing the axe, as though to strike the fatal blow, another struck his neck with a wet towel. [33] Lauder Brunton: _On the Pathology and Treatment of Shock and Syncope_, p. 8. When they took the bandage from his eyes he was dead! V One of the greatest physiologists of fear was Edgar Allan Poe, the unhappy poet who lived in morbid hallucinations, and died at the age of thirty-seven in a hospital, a victim to intemperance, amidst the horrors and convulsions of _delirium tremens_. No one has ever described fear more minutely, none have so ruthlessly analysed, or made us feel with more intensity, the pain of overwhelming emotions--the throbbing which seems to burst the heart and crush the soul, the suffocating oppression, the awful agony of him who awaits death. No one ever plunged the mind of man into more horrible abysses, or led it into darker, gloomier wildernesses. None have ever inspired such horror with storm, tempest, the phosphorescence of decay, the lightning-flashes in the dead of night, the sighs and moans losing themselves in the darkness, the grip of fleshless hands amid the mystery of graves and ruins.