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11/18/2005: "Suspending disbelief"
I've had a lot of trouble with hangings recently. One in particular, where a gentleman 'known to the police' was found by a policeman suspended from his loft hatch. Unfortunately the constable who found him didn't cut him down immediately (he was following procedures then current in the force), contenting himself with feeling for a pulse. When he didn't find one, he assumed he was dead.
Death by hanging is a complex and, in most cases, unknowable thing. There are theoretically four ways to die when putting a noose around one's neck. The first is easy and, unfortunately, fairly rare except in the case of judicial hangings; death occurs by breaking the neck above the sixth cervical vertebra. When that happens, the respiratory and circulatory centres are severed from the rest of the central nervous system and death is instantaneous. Official hangmen used to spend a lot of time calculating the length of fall that would achieve this with the minimum of damage.
Most people, though, don't use a calculator. They come by their deaths by one combination of three mechanisms. As the noose tightens it constricts first the venous return from the brain, then its arterial supply. The brain can survive without oxygenated blood for only a very short period before damage occurs. Something else that might occur is a blockage to the upper airways; this is not usually due so much to crush injury to the trachea or larynx as to the tongue being pushed up against the back of the pharynx. Most pathologists, though, believe that the usual method of death is vagal stimulation. The vagus is the tenth cranial nerve and it runs down neck from the base of the brain to, amongst other organs, the heart. It is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, the one that acts to calm us, and it slows the heart; stimulate it enough and it stops the heart. It is thought that the act of constriction of the neck stimulates the vagus to such an extent that the heart stops. This might well happen very quickly indeed.
But stopping the heart doesn't mean death. Stopped hearts can be started, as we know from Casualty and ER. True, one doesn't have long before, as mentioned above, brain damage occurs, but one can't assume that the lack of pulse means that the soul has departed.
One other thing about hanging.
It really is incredibly difficult to kill someone by hanging and make it look like suicide. Believe me.
PS The gentleman with peritonitis following his cancer operation died a natural death because his duodenal ulcer perforated (burst). The surgical operation was a complete success.
That's life.
Keith McCarthy on Friday, November 18th 2005 @ 07:25 PM GMT [link]