Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented

by William Tebb; Edward Perry Vollum

“A correspondent, signing himself T.E.N., in To-Day, October 12, 1895, says:—‘When acting as special correspondent to the Evening Herald in Hamburg during the cholera plague, I met a gentleman who had been passed for dead and placed in the mortuary to await burial. When the porters entered some hours later to remove the hundred or so bodies, they found this gentleman sitting up in great pain, and very much frightened. He was placed in a ward and recovered. About the same time a little girl came to life actually at the graveside. She had been brought in one of several four-horse vans that conveyed bodies for interment in the Ohlsdorff grave-yard. Fortunately for her, she had not been placed in a coffin, the exigencies of the time rendering it impossible to provide caskets for the dead. When the disease began to die out, the people found time to ask—“Can it be possible that life remains in any of the bodies buried?” That the doctors in the latter days cut the ulnar arteries of all subjects before passing them for dead is full of significance.’”

The three following cases were communicated to the author, during his sojourn in Calcutta, by Dr. Chew, in the early part of this year (1896):—

CASES COMMUNICATED BY DR. CHEW.

“In March, 1877, Assistant-Surgeons H. A. Borthwick, S. Blake, H. B. Rogers, and myself received orders to proceed from Rawal Pindi by bullock-train to Peshawur to join the various regiments we were to be posted to for duty. We had just passed a place called Rati when Borthwick showed strong symptoms of cholera, from which he suffered all that night. The nearest hospital was twenty-five miles behind us, and though we had neither medicines nor sick-room comforts with us, we had no alternative but to journey onwards, because the train-drivers (Indians) refused to turn back, and if we did return to Rawal Pindi we would have been court-martialled for disobeying lawful commands and coming back without orders to do so. Travelling by bullock-train is very slow work, and far from a comfortable mode of transit; however, we were obliged to make the best of it, and early next morning Borthwick was cold, stiff, and seemingly dead. Here was a fine state of affairs—the nearest cantonment, which we had no expectation of reaching (i.e., Nowshera) before nine p.m., was thirty-six miles off, and by the time we arrived at it, it would have been too late to approach the authorities, while Peshawur, our destination, was another twenty-nine miles further off. Dispose of the body we dared not, and we had no choice but to continue our route. All that day there was not a movement or other sign to show that life was not extinct, and affairs seemed no better by five p.m. next day, when we reached Peshawur. The apparent corpse was lifted out of the bullock-train and carried into the hospital dispensary (where a strong fire was blazing) preparatory to papers being signed and arrangements made for its final disposal. Whether it was the heat of the fire before which he was placed, or whether the vibriones had produced an antitoxin, I am not prepared to argue; but we do know that Borthwick recovered consciousness while lying on the bed in that dispensary, and that he whom we mourned as dead returned to life. He served in the same military stations with me in the North-West Frontier till 1880, when he accompanied me to the Calcutta Medical College, where we parted company in February, 1882, I bound for Egypt and he for frontier duty. At first we corresponded regularly, but since 1885 we lost touch of each other.”

“REVIVAL IN A MORTUARY IN INDIA.

“Sergeant J. Clements Twining, of H.M.’s 109th regiment of British infantry, located at Dinapoor in 1876, was brought in an unconscious state to the hospital, supposed to be suffering from coup de soleil. Everything that could be done was ineffectually tried to rouse him from coma, and he was removed to the dead-house to wait post-mortem next morning. At two a.m. the sentry on the dead-house came rushing down to the dispensary (about four hundred and fifty yards off) declaring that he had seen and heard a ghost in the dead-house, to which myself and the compounder and dresser on duty at once proceeded, to find that Clements Twining, who was now partially conscious, was lying on the dead-house flags groaning most piteously—he had rolled off the table on to the floor. He returned to health, and in 1877 accompanied his regiment to England, where I met him at Woolwich in 1883, and he asked me to corroborate his story of ‘returning to life’ to certain of his acquaintances who had refused to believe him.”

“CHOLERA CORPSES REVIVED IN A MORTUARY.

“When the East Norfolk regiment was out cholera-dodging in 1878, Colour-Sergeant T. Hall and Corporal W. Bellomy were sent into cantonments for burial as cholera corpses in the Nowshera Cemetery.THE USE OF MORTUARIES. There was some delay in the interment owing to a difficulty in obtaining the wood necessary for their coffins, so both bodies were placed in the dead-house, which was generously sprinkled with disinfectants to ward off the risk of contagion. First Hall and then Bellomy regained consciousness, and were duly returned to duty. The following year Bellomy was ‘invalided’ to England, where I understand he now enjoys the best of health.”

“Shortly after the Afghan war of 1878, Surgeon-Major T. Barnwell and I were told off to take a large number of time-expired men, invalids, and wounded, to Deolali on their way to England. Some of the wounded were in a very critical state, necessitating great care; one man in particular, Trooper Holmes of the 10th Hussars, who had an ugly bullet-wound running along his left thigh and under the groin. Our only means of transport for these poor fellows was the ‘palki’ or doolie carried by four bearers at a curious swinging pace. When we got to Nowshera, Holmes seemed on a fair way to recovery, but the swinging of the doolie seemed too much for him, and he grew weaker day by day till we got to Hassan Abdool, when we could not rouse him to take some nourishment before starting on the march, and to all appearance he seemed perfectly dead; but, as there was neither the time nor convenience to hold a post-mortem, we carried the body on to ‘John Nicholson,’ where, the same difficulties being in the way, and no facilities for burial, we were obliged to put the post-mortem off for another day, and convey the corpse to Rawal Pindi rest camp, where we laid him on the floor of the mortuary tent and covered him over with a tarpaulin. This was his salvation, as next morning (i.e., the third day succeeding his ‘death’), when we raised the tarpaulin to hold the post-mortem, some hundreds of field mice (these tracts are noted for them) rushed out, and we noticed that Holmes was breathing, though very slowly—five or six respirations to the minute—and there were a few teeth marks where the mice had attacked his calves. To prevent a relapse by the jolting on further marches, we handed him over to the station hospital staff, who pulled him round, and then forwarded him to the headquarters of his regiment at Meerut.”