Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented

by William Tebb; Edward Perry Vollum

A lady, distinguished alike for her literary gifts as well as for her philanthropy, sends me the following:—

“I am much obliged to you for sending me ‘Perils.’ It is a terrible subject, and one that has haunted me all my life, insomuch that I have never made a will without inserting a clause requiring my throat to be cut before I am put underground. Of course one can have no reliance on doctors whatever, and I have myself known a case in which a very eminent one insisted on a coffin being screwed down because the corpse looked so life-like and full of colour that the friends could not help indulging in hopes.

CASES IN IRELAND.

“My great grandmother, after whom I am called, a famous heiress, was a notable case of narrow escape. As a girl she passed into a state of apparent death, and a great funeral was ordered for her. Among the guests came a young girl friend, who insisted that she was not dead, and raised such a stir that the funeral was postponed, and time was allowed to pass till the marvel became that there were no signs of change. I could never ascertain how long this comatose state lasted before she recovered; but she did recover, so thoroughly that after her marriage with Richard Trench, of Garbuly, she became the mother of twenty-two children. Obviously this was no case of a feeble, hysterical, cataleptic subject. I will enclose photograph taken from a miniature of her in a ring in my possession.

“There was another case, well known in Ireland in my youth, of a Colonel Howard, who had a fine place (I think it was called Castle Howard) in Wicklow. He was supposed to be dead, and a lead coffin was actually made with his name and date of death on it; after which Colonel Howard came to life, and had the plate of the coffin fixed over his kitchen chimney as a warning to his servants not to bury people in a hurry.”

Dr. Colin S. Valentine, LL.D., Principal of the Medical Missionary Training College, Agra, N.W.P., told the author during his visit to Agra, February, 1896, that Captain Young, an officer in the regiment of which he (Dr. Valentine) was at that time army surgeon, who had been dreadfully mauled while tiger-hunting in Madras, was laid out for dead, and all the arrangements were made for his funeral at six o’clock that evening, when consciousness returned, and he lived for twenty years after.

In a lecture on “Signs of Death and Disposal of the Dead,” delivered by Dr. A. Stephenson at Nottingham, January 9, 1896, the lecturer said “he once attended a girl living in that locality who was in a trance. All the preparations were made for her funeral, and the grave ordered. She remained in a trance three days, and her mother was annoyed because he would not sign her death-certificate. On the third day she slowly rose and recovered. The girl would have been buried unless he had had a very great fear of her being buried alive.”[6]

From the London Echo, March 3, 1896.

“NARROW ESCAPE OF A GREEK-ORTHODOX METROPOLITAN.

“A letter from Constantinople, in the Politische Korrespondenz, gives a remarkable case of an apparent death which would have ended in a premature burial but for the high ecclesiastical position of the person concerned. On the 3rd of this month, Nicephorus Glycas, the Greek-Orthodox Metropolitan of Lesbos, an old man in his eightieth year, after several days of confinement to his bed, was reported by the physician to be dead. The supposed dead bishop, in accordance with the rules of the Orthodox Church, was immediately clothed in his episcopal vestments, and placed upon the Metropolitan’s throne in the great church of Methymni, where the body was exposed to the devout faithful during the day, and watched by relays of priests day and night. Crowds streamed into the church to take a last look at their venerable chief pastor. On the second night of “the exposition of the corpse,” the Metropolitan suddenly started up from his seat and stared round him with amazement and horror at all the panoply of death amidst which he had been seated. The priests were not less horrified when the ‘dead’ bishop demanded what they were doing with him? The old man had simply fallen into a death-like lethargy, which the incompetent doctors had hastily concluded to be death. He is now as hale and hearty as can well be expected from an octogenarian. But here it is that the moral comes in. If Nicephorus Glycas had been a layman he would most certainly have been buried alive. Fortunately for him the Canon Law of the Orthodox Church does not allow a bishop to be buried earlier than the third day after his death; whereas a layman, according to the ancient Eastern custom, is generally buried about twelve hours after death has been certified. The excitement which has been aroused by the prelate’s startling resurrection may tend to set men thinking more seriously about the frequent probability of the cruel horror of the interment of living persons.”