CHAPTER XIX.
SUGGESTIONS FOR PREVENTION.
The learned Dr. Vigné, of Rouen, who won the respect of his fellow-citizens during a long and honourable career, was for many years engaged in the study of this question, and published the result of his researches shortly before his death. Convinced that the resources of science were insufficient to distinguish real from apparent death, he left testamentary instructions to provide against his own premature burial. (“Des Inhumations Précipitées, p. 83,” by Lénormand.)
Dr. Winslow, a French physician, who had on two different occasions very nearly fallen a victim to premature burial, having been laid out for dead, chose for the subject of his thesis before the Paris Faculty of Medicine, “Les moyens les plus propres à reconnaître la réalité de la mort.” Dr. Winslow may be said to have been the pioneer of a movement in France for exposing the danger of, and educating the public into the necessity of reforms in, the mode of treating the apparent dead; and, although his efforts and warnings were as of one crying in the wilderness or amongst an apathetic people, with a legislature apparently uninfluenced either by facts or by reason, they were never relaxed. Numerous writers have since confirmed the truth of Dr. Winslow’s contention by facts within their own experience, and it is believed that legislation in France cannot be much longer delayed.
That the risk of premature burial is not an imaginary one, as recently declared by a leading London medical journal, has been shown by the citation in this volume of cases of death-like trance which have baffled the ablest of medical experts; also the instances of numerous narrow escapes from this terrible occurrence, and of others where the victims were suffocated before timely aid could be obtained, most of which are drawn from medical sources, and some from the columns of the said sceptical journal. The painful reality is also shown by the multitude of preventive measures suggested by medical authorities, and by the ingenious contrivances of those who have made this distressing subject one of patient and laborious research. Several of the remedies suggested for adoption in cataleptic cases are really homicidal, or seriously mutilative; many of them are impracticable, and have been shown by Hufeland, Lénormand, Richardson, Hartmann, Bouchut, Fletcher, and Gannal to be delusive. The merits and demerits of some of these methods might be inquired into by the appointment of a Parliamentary Committee, or a Royal Commission, as a supplement to that appointed in 1893, by Mr. Asquith, on Death-Certification.
CUTANEOUS EXCITATION.
Dr. James Curry, F.R.S., in his “Observations on Apparent Death,” pp. 56, 57, says, concerning the application of stimulants to the skin:—
“To assist in rousing the activity of the vital principle, it has been customary to apply various stimulating matters to different parts of the body. But, as some of these applications are in themselves positively hurtful, and the others serviceable only according to the time and manner of their employment, it will be proper to consider them particularly.