Can sick people gain mental clarity just before they die? University of Virginia researchers Michael Nahm and Bruce Greyson explore this issue in a gripping (if macabre) paper published in the journal Omega: The death of Anna Katharina Ehmer: a case study in terminal lucidity.
The authors discuss the case of Anna Katharina Ehmer, a German woman who lived from 1895 to 1922. Profoundly disabled, Ehmer spent most of her life in the Hephata asylum, near Schwalmstadt in central Germany. According to Friedrich Happich (1883–1951), a Protestant theologian who was something like the asylum's chaplain, Ehmer was
among the patients with the most severe mental disabilities who have ever lived in our institution. From birth on, she was seriously retarded. She had never learned to speak a single word... She gorged her food, fouled herself day and night... we have never seen that she had taken notice of her environment ...
