Dr. Moore Russell Fletcher, in his “Suspended Animation and Restoration,” Boston, 1890, p. 19, speaking of the treatment of the dead in the United States, says:—“It is doubtful whether modern civilisation has much advanced the rites of burial, or the means of preventing interment before positive death. The practice now is, as soon as apparent death takes place, to begin at once preparing the body for burial; the relatives and physician desert the room, pack it in ice or open the windows, thus banishing any possible chance of reviving or resuscitating any spark of vitality which may exist. No examination is ever made by the physician or the friends to see if there are even the faintest signs of life present. Under such circumstances, and with no attempts made at discovering whether any signs of life were still present (but a hasty burial instead), it is not strange that cases of premature interment frequently occur.”
The Rev. Walter Whiter, in his “Dissertation on the Disorder of Death,” 1819, p. 328, sensibly observes:—“The signs marked on the dying and the dead are fallacious. The dying man may be the sinking man, exhausted by his malady, or perhaps exhausting his malady, and fainting under the conflict. Exert all the arts which you possess, and which have been found not only able to resuscitate and restore the dying, but even the dead; rouse him from this perilous condition, and suffer him not, by your supineness and neglect, to pass into a state of putrefactive death.” And in p. 363:—“If the humane societies had applied the same methods in various cases of natural death which they have adopted in the case of drowning, and if they had obtained a similar success in the cultivation of their art, the gloom of the bed of death would be brightened with cheering prospects, and would have become the bed of restoration and the scene of hope.”
AN OPENING FOR THE PROFESSION.
In this connection we may remark that no profession is more overcrowded at the present time than that of medicine, particularly in the United Kingdom, the English Colonies, and the United States. Hundreds of young men graduate from medical colleges every year, vainly seeking openings for a practice; and some, for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, resort to expedients which the Lancet denounces as undignified, unprofessional, and disgraceful.[18] Then, again, the number of nurses and of those qualifying for this honourable vocation is already in excess of the demand, and nursing institutions under the keen competition to which they are subjected, are reducing their charges. Now, the care and treatment of the supposed dead is an honourable vocation, offering a wide field for the instructed physician and the tender and sympathetic nurse, and if the appliances for resuscitation were always at hand, as they should be, in every hospital, town-hall, mortuary, police station, and in all large hotels and churches, many lives now subjected to the risks of premature burial would be saved. While in London there are two or more houses or retreats for the dying, there is no place for the apparently dead but a shunned and neglected coffin. The time is not far distant when the present mode of treating the dead and the apparently dead—a practice born of superstition and fear, by which many are consigned to premature graves—will be catalogued amongst the barbarisms of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER XVI.
NUMBER OF CASES OF PREMATURE BURIAL.
Those interested in the movement, if we are right in designating the widespread feeling of discontent by this name, are occasionally asked if the cases of premature burial are numerous, and what estimates, if any, have been made of them. We have no means of answering these queries. We do not even know the percentage of people who are subject to trance, catalepsy, shocks, stroke of lightning, syncope, exhausting lethargy, excessive opium-eating, or other diseases or conditions which produce the various death-counterfeits. Personal inquiries over a considerable portion of Europe, America, and the East prove that such cases are by no means of infrequent occurrence, and this is the deliberate conclusion of nearly all the authorities cited in this volume.
Dr. Chambers wrote in 1787—“Every age and country affords instances of surprising recoveries, after lying long for dead. From the number of those preserved by lucky accidents, we may conclude a far greater number might have been preserved by timely pains and skill.”—Cited in Mort Apparente et Mort Réelle, p. 17.