NARCOTICS.
Referring to the supposed death of a girl, Sarola, aged eleven years, to whom chloroform had been administered in September, 1894, under peculiar circumstances, and the body hurried off to cremation, Dr. Roger S. Chew, of Calcutta, writes:—“That bottle of medicine was charged with having caused the death of little Sarola, who, I firmly believe, was burned alive while in a cataleptic condition induced by the hysterical convulsions, and rendered profound by the administration of the chloroform.CHLOROFORM DEATHS PREVENTABLE. Surgeon Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Lawrie agrees with me that at least ninety per cent. of the chloroform deaths are preventable if proper measures are adopted to resuscitate the body, and it is quite possible for a chloroform narcotic to be launched into eternity on the funeral pyre or in the suffocating earth. What a mournful vista Sarola’s case opens up, and who can say how many hundreds have been similarly disposed of!”—Communicated to the Author.
Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, in “The Absolute Signs and Proofs of Death,” in the Asclepiad, first quarter, 1889, p. 9, says:—“In the first experiments made in this country with chloral, after the discovery of its effects by Liebriech, we learned that such a deep narcotism could be induced by this narcotic that it might be impossible to say whether an animal under its influence were alive or dead.” And referring to cataleptic trance due to shock, he observes, p. 11, “True traumatic catalepsy is equally remarkable, and equally embarrassing. It has been witnessed in the most destructive form after shock by lightning, and it may also have been met with after severe blows and contusions of the head.”
CHOLERA.
Dr. Chew, referring to another of the predisposing causes of apparent death, and the danger of premature burial in India, says:—“In the cholera season there is a risk of a soldier being buried alive, as the custom is to get rid of the body as soon as possible, and it is very seldom indeed that a post-mortem is held on a cholera corpse. If the case be one of true cholera, decomposition sets in before the breath has entirely left the body, and, immediately life is extinct, putrefaction rushes forward so rapidly as to render a mistake impossible; but in choleraic diarrhœa or the lighter forms of cholera it is possible that coma resultant on extreme collapse may suspend animation so as to simulate real death without actual cessation of vital energy, and lead to live sepulture, except where, by some such lucky accident as the burial ground being a long journey off, the funeral is delayed sufficiently to give a chance of recovery. And this same accident may prove a salvation in syncope or coma from shock or protracted illness.
“With the civil population, save in very exceptional cases, there is very little chance of recovery from apparent death, as the time between alleged decease and sepulture is very short indeed; and unless there are unmistakable signs of trance, syncope, or coma, the victim must die after he (or she) has been buried alive.”
VARIOUS PREDISPOSING DISEASES.
Living burials take place because the general public are ignorant of the fact that there are many (some thirty) diseases, and some states of the body that cannot be called diseases, as well as a number of incidents and accidents, which produce all the appearances of death so closely as to deceive any one.
THEIR NUMBER AND VARIETY.