In the Cyclopædia of Practical Medicine, edited by Sir John Forbes, M.D., and others, 1847, vol. i., pp. 548-9, we find the following:—“Nothing is more certain than death; nothing is more uncertain at times than its reality; and numerous instances are recorded of persons prematurely buried, or actually at the verge of the grave before it was discovered that life still remained; and even of some who were resuscitated by the knife of the anatomist.... Bruhier, a celebrated French physician, who wrote on the uncertainties of the signs of death in 1742, relates an instance of a young woman upon whose supposed corpse an anatomical examination was about to be made when the first stroke of the scalpel revealed the truth; she recovered, and lived many years afterwards. The case related by Philippe Pue is somewhat similar. He proceeded to perform the Cæsarean section upon a woman who had to all appearance died undelivered, when the first incision betrayed the awful fallacy under which he acted.... ‘There is scarcely a dissecting-room that has not some traditional story handed down of subjects restored to life after being deposited within its walls. Many of these are mere inventions to catch the ever greedy ear of curiosity; but some of them are, we fear, too well founded to admit of much doubt. To this class belongs the circumstance related by Louis, the celebrated French writer on medical jurisprudence. A patient who was supposed to have died in the Hospital Salpétrière was removed to his dissecting-room. Next morning Louis was informed that moans had been heard in the theatre; and on proceeding thither he found to his horror that the supposed corpse had revived during the night, and had actually died in the struggle to disengage himself from the winding sheet in which he was enveloped. This was evident from the distorted attitude in which the body was found. Allowing for much of the fiction with which such a subject must ever be mixed, there is still sufficient evidence to warrant a diligent examination of the means of discriminating between real and apparent death; indeed, the horror with which we contemplate a mistake of the living for the dead should excite us to the pursuit of knowledge by which an event so repugnant to our feelings may be avoided.... If life depends upon the presence of a force or power continually opposed to the action of physical and chemical laws, real death will be the loss of this force, and the abandonment of organised bodies to these agents; while apparent death will be only the suspension of the exercise of life, caused by some derangement of the functions which serve as instruments of vital action. This suspension must have been lost for a considerable time, if we may judge by the cases collected by credible authors, to some of which we have alluded, and by the numerous instances of drowned persons restored to life after long submersion. From this definition of life and death, it would follow that putrefaction is the only evidence of real death.’ ... The absence of the circulation of the blood has been looked upon as a certain indication of death; but this test is not much to be depended on, for it is well known that persons may live even for hours in whom no trace of the action of the heart and arteries can be perceived.”
Le Guern, in “Du Danger Des Inhumations Précipitées,” chap. iv., p. 24, relates that “The Abbé Prévost was found in the forest of Chantilly perfectly insensible. They thought him dead. A surgeon proceeded to make a post-mortem; but hardly had he put the scalpel in the body of the unfortunate victim before the supposed corpse uttered a cry, and the surgeon realised the mistake he had made. Prévost only became conscious to feel aware of the horror of the death by which he perished.”
Dr. Franz Hartmann, in his “Premature Burial,” p. 80, has the following:—
“In May, 1864, a man died very suddenly at a hospital in the State of New York, and, as the doctors could not explain the cause of death, they resolved upon a post-mortem examination, but, when they made the first cut with the knife, the supposed dead man jumped up and grasped the doctor’s throat. The doctor was terrified and died of apoplexy on the spot, but the “dead” man recovered fully.
Brigade-Surgeon W. Curran in his 8th paper, entitled “Buried Alive,” relates the following:—“At the Medical College at Calcutta, on the 1st of February, 1861,” so writes my friend as above, “the body of a Hindu male, about 25 years of age, was brought from the police hospital for dissection.... It was brought to the dissecting-room about 6 a.m., and the arteries were injected with arsenical solution about 7. At 11 the prosector opened the thorax and abdomen for the purpose of dissecting the sympathetic nerve. At noon Mr. Macnamara distinctly saw the heart beating; there was a regular rythmical vermicular action of the right auricle and ventricle. The pericardium was open, the heart being freely exposed, and lying to the left in its natural position. The heart’s action, although regular, was very weak and slow. The left auricle was also in action, but the left ventricle was contracted and rigid, and apparently motionless. These spontaneous contractions continued till about 12.45 p.m., and, further, the right side of this organ contracted on the application of a stimulus, such as the point of a scalpel, &c., for a quarter of an hour longer.”—Health, May 21st, 1886, p. 121.
Bruhier in his work, “Dissertation sur l’Incertitude de la Mort et l’Abus des Enterrements,” records a number of cases of the supposed dead who, after burial, were revived at the dissecting table, together with fifty-three that awoke in their coffins before being buried, fifty-two persons actually buried alive, and seventy-two other cases of apparent death. This was at a time when body-snatching was in vogue, and it is a curious comment on our civilisation to be compelled to admit that a subject of trance or catalepsy during the last or the early part of the present century had a better chance of escape from so terrible a fate than now, when the vocation of the resurrection-man has become obsolete.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DEATH-CERTIFICATION.