Coup de grâce Coup de grâce A coup de grâce (; French for "blow of mercy") is a death blow to end the suffering of a severely wounded person or animal. It may be a mercy killing of civilians or soldiers, friends or enemies, with or without the sufferer's consent. Examples of "coup de grâce" include shooting the heart or head (typically the back of the skull) of a wounded, but still living, person during an execution or by humanely killing a suffering, mortally wounded soldier, in war, for whom medical aid is not available. In pre-firearms eras the wounded were finished with
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in the laying out of the sandwalk, his "thinking path", at Down House in Kent in 1846. These aspects of Darwin's personal life are discussed in John Bowlby's (1990) psychoanalytic biography of Darwin. Darwin emphasises a shared human and animal ancestry in sharp contrast to the arguments deployed in Charles Bell's "Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression" (1824). Bell claimed that the facial muscles were divinely designed in order to express uniquely human feelings. Eager to stress the differences between human and animal communication, Bell wrote: "Expression is to the passions as language is to thought." In "The Expression", Darwin reformulates