CHAPTER X.
THE DANGER OF HASTY BURIALS.
Early burials are advocated and defended by certain writers on sanitary grounds; and there is, no doubt, something to be said for them, provided the body shows unmistakable signs of dissolution; but to impose a general rule upon Englishmen by Parliament, or upon Americans by State Legislature, as has been urged, would add to the existing evil of perfunctory and mistaken diagnosis of death, and greatly increase the number of premature interments. The Romans kept the bodies of the dead a week before burial, lest through haste they should inter them while life remained. Servius, in his commentary on Virgil, tells us—“That on the eighth day they burned the body, and on the ninth put its ashes in the grave.” Plato enjoined the bodies of the dead to be kept until the third day, in order (as he says) to be satisfied of the reality of the death. Quintilian explains why the Romans delayed burials as follows:—“For what purpose do ye imagine that long-delayed interments were invented? Or on what account is it that the mournful pomp of funeral solemnities is always interrupted by sorrowful groans and piercing cries? Why, for no other reason, but because we have seen persons return to life after they were about to be laid in the grave as dead.” “For this reason,” adds Lancisi, in “De Subita. Mort.,” lib. i., cap. 15, “the Legislature has wisely and prudently prohibited the immediate, or the too speedy, interment of all dead persons, and especially of such as have the misfortune to be cut off by a sudden death.”
THE ADVANTAGE OF DELAY.
Terilli, a celebrated physician of Venice, in a treatise of the “Causes of Sudden Death,” sect. vi., cap. 2, says:—“Since the body is sometimes so deprived of every vital function, and the principle of life reduced so low, that it cannot be distinguished from death, the laws both of natural comparison and revealed religion oblige us to wait a sufficient time for life manifesting itself by the usual signs, peradventure it should not be, as yet, totally extinguished; and if we should act a contrary part, we may possibly become murderers, by confining to the gloomy regions of the dead those who are actually alive.”
Mr. Cooper, surgeon, in his treatise on “The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death,” pp. 70, 71, had in his possession the following certificate, written and signed by Mr. Blau, a native of Auvergne, a man of untainted veracity:—“I hereto subscribe, and declare, that fifty-five years ago, happening to reside at Toulouse for the sake of my studies, and going to St. Stephen’s Church to hear a sermon, I saw a corpse brought thither for the sake of interment. The ceremony, however, was delayed till the sermon should be over; but the supposed dead person, being laid in a chapel and attended by all the mourners, about the middle of the sermon discovered manifest signs of life, for which reason he was quickly conveyed back to his own house. From a consideration of circumstances, it is sufficiently obvious that, without the intervention of the sermon, the man had been interred alive.”
Between 1780 and 1800 many pamphlets on the subject appeared in Germany and France. Opposite sides were taken, some advocating delay until putrefaction, others urging immediate burial.
In 1788, Marcus Hertz wrote strongly against the prevailing precipitate burials among the Jews. He asked “what motive could justify hasty burials;” and continued:—“The writings of learned men and doctors, of both early times and recent date, describe the dangers of precipitate burial; there is not a town in the world that has not its stories of revivals in the grave.”
In 1791, Rev. J. W. C. Wolff, in Germany, published numerous narratives of narrow escapes from the grave.