The several petitions were forwarded to the Minister of the Interior, but nothing was done to remedy the evil.
From the Lancet, June 2, 1866, p. 611.
“ON SUSPENDED ANIMATION.
“In the course of the address delivered by Dr. Brewer to the Guardians of St. George’s at St. James’s Hall, he adverted to the ‘laying-out’ case at St. Pancras.... Dr. Brewer ... dwelt upon the question of suspended animation in a passage which really deserves to be quoted....
CASE REPORTED BY DR. BREWER.
“‘I have been more than once under a condition of apparently suspended respiration, and with circumstances less comfortable than those related of this babe; and yet, active as is my brain, and sensitive as is my body, I remember as well as though it were but yesterday that, on being restored to consciousness, no feeling of discomfort of any kind attended my experience on either occasion. It is under the truth to say I have known a score of cases of those who have been supposed dead being reanimated. It is not many months ago a friend of mine, a rector of a suburban parish, was pronounced by his medical attendant to be dead. His bed was arranged, and the room left in its silence. His daughter had re-entered and sat at the foot, and the solemn toll of his own church bell was vibrating through the chamber, when a hand drew aside the closed curtain, and a voice came from the occupant of the bed—“Elizabeth, my dear, what is that bell tolling for?” The daughter’s response was, perhaps, an unfortunate one: “For you, papa.” Schwartz, the first eminent Indian missionary, was roused from his supposed death by hearing his favourite hymn sung over him previous to the last rites being performed, and his resuscitation made known by his joining in the verse.’”
Dr. B. W. Richardson quotes a case in the Lancet, 1888, vol. ii., p. 1179, of a man who, in 1869, was rendered cataleptic by a lightning-stroke, and who narrowly escaped living burial.
Dr. Moore Russell Fletcher in his work on “Suspended Animation,” p. 26, says:—
“In June, 1869, a girl in Cleveland, Ohio, was taken ill, and after a short sickness died, and was laid out for burial; but as her mother insisted that she was not dead, efforts were made for some time to restore her to life, but in vain. Her mother, however, refused to let her be buried; and on the fifth day after that set for the funeral the slamming of a door aroused her, so that she recovered. She stated that, during most of the eight days which she lay there, she was conscious and heard what was said, although wholly unable to make the least motion.”