It is quite impossible on the Continent for an enquirer, as the author knows from experience, to obtain reliable information with regard to what takes place within the walls of mortuaries, because of the numerous officials and others who are interested in covering up any errors of previous death-certification that may come to light in them. These comprise the health authorities, and the police in places where the latter regulate funerals, as well as the physicians, whose credit is at stake, and the nurses and undertakers. In many districts in Germany the original object of the mortuaries—the prevention of premature burial—advocated by Hufeland and others, has not been kept in view, but the edifices have rather been used for the convenience of the undertakers and their assistants, the bodies in many cases being removed before actual dissolution was established by evidence of putrefaction. This will need to be guarded against by more careful supervision.
CHAPTER XXII.
CONCLUSION.
It is universally admitted that nothing is less certain than life; and if the reader will weigh the facts, which it has been the authors’ intention to understate rather than overstate, he will rightly conclude that nothing is more uncertain than the signs which are ordinarily accepted as indicating death. It would have been easy to fill a much larger volume than this with reports of authentic cases of premature burial, and narrow escapes from such terrible mischances, and with more detailed results of the authors’ researches on the subject in various parts of Europe and America, as well as in the East. The cases adduced to illustrate the text are, however, presented as types of hundreds of others obtainable from equally reputable sources, and to be found in the works of various trustworthy authorities, the titles of which can be seen in the Bibliography at the end of this volume.
The London Review for July, 1791, p. 40, referring to “An Essay on Vital Suspension: Being an Attempt to Investigate and Ascertain those Diseases in which the Principles of Life are Apparently Extinguished,” by a Medical Practitioner—observes, that this is one of many publications “written by physicians and surgeons, versed in medical science, and well skilled in anatomy, to demonstrate, beyond a possibility of contradiction, that there are many cases in which the human body has the appearance of death, and preserves it for a considerable time, without the reality; the vital principle being still unsubdued, and a restoration of all its powers and functions practicable by the administration, in due time, of proper means.” The author of the pamphlet under review says, “It is a proof of the temerity and imbecility of human judgment, that we have too many instances on record, wherein even the most skilful physicians have erred in the decisions they have pronounced respecting the extinction of life.”
IMBECILITY OF HUMAN JUDGMENT.
Unfortunately, we appear to be no nearer the prevention of these terrible mistakes now than we were when the reviewer called attention to them a century ago. The imbecility of human judgment complained of exists now in an unmitigated degree. The appearance of death is generally taken for its reality: and the great mass of the inhabitants of this planet are hurried to their graves without (except in a comparatively few cases of drowning or poisoning) the application of any serious efforts at restoration, and without waiting for unequivocal signs of dissolution.
Whether the risks of being buried alive are as great as those declared by some of the authorities quoted in this volume, must be left to the reader to determine for himself; but that they are considerable there appears little room for doubt by those who have taken the trouble to inquire into the facts. How often is the reader shocked by reading narratives in his daily or weekly newspaper of persons either buried alive, or of those in a state of suspended animation, but diagnosed and duly certificated by the attending doctor as dead, who have returned to consciousness during the funeral rites or at the grave itself.