In conformity with the plan upon which we have arranged the objects of inquiry into the causes of sudden sickness and death—that of beginning with the most simple and plain, and passing in regular gradation to the more complicated and obscure problems, the present case, in which the patient is dead, but the attendants are able to furnish some history, however imperfect, very naturally constitutes the connecting link between that in which the patient is living, and that in which the great avenues of information are entirely closed upon us by the death of the individual, and the total absence of all direct testimony. The plan, therefore, upon which the investigation of this case is to be conducted, is in a great measure to be derived from the application of those precepts which are contained in the other cases; that relating to the examination of the attendants being collected from the first, and all that concerns the death, from the third. There is, however, one object of inquiry which may be mentioned in this place with peculiar propriety, as the obscure and often erroneous evidence which is given in cases of sudden death, during an affray, renders it highly important to learn, _whether the deceased had died during a paroxysm of passion_. We have little doubt but that many persons have been convicted of murder, where the death of the individual in question, was the sole effect of the high state of irritation in which he had been placed. That life may be suddenly extinguished by the violent impulse of passion we have already shewn under the consideration of Syncope (p. 26), and we are farther prepared to assert that Apoplexy[5], and other fatal diseases may also, in certain states of predisposition, result from the same powerful cause; violent transports of the mind may likewise occasion the return of any particular disease to which the patient had been formerly subject, as epilepsy, and other spasmodic diseases; they may likewise bring a chronic disease at once to a fatal crisis, as we have seen in the case related at page 29 of the 2d volume; the fact has been also well illustrated by _Dr. Gordon Smith_, in the case which occurred to a surgeon of his acquaintance in one of the midland counties, of which the following is an outline. “In the course of an altercation between a man and his wife, the woman died, and a clamour was raised that the husband had murdered her: an inquest being held, a verdict was returned against him, and he stood his trial at the following assizes; he was, however, acquitted, for it appeared in evidence that he had not even touched his wife during the quarrel. The deceased was a person of an extremely violent temper, and on opening her body, it was found that she had been labouring under suppuration of the liver, and that an abscess had burst into the cavity of the abdomen, in consequence of the agitation into which she had been thrown.” _Baron Larey_ describes the case of a person who had been violently wounded in