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BURYING ALIVE.A Certain Percentage of Premature Burials Occur Yearly —Safeguards That Doctors Should Provide.y | f HEBE is probably no horrorI f morouniversal, more intense,X more sonl-snbduing, than the horror of being buried alive. Ask any ten men and women at random what is the worst nightmare fear which oppresses the ordinary sane person, and. they will say the fear of being buried alive. There is hardly human being who has not shuddered at the thought of the thirty or forty seconds’ agony—it could hardly be more—which would take place were he to awake from a trance and find his arms pressed to the coffin’s sides, and the coffin lid almost touching his lips. Of course the want of air would very soon bring unconsciousness, but till it did, how awful would be the impotent struggle. Burning, drowning, even the most hideous mutilation under a railway train, is as nothing compared with burying alive. Strangely enough, this universal horror seems to have produced no desire to guard against burying alive. We all fear it, and yet practically no one takes any ■trouble to avoid the risk of it happening in his own case, or in that of the rest of mankind. It would be the simplest thing in the world to take i away all chance of burying alive; and yet the world remains indifferent and t enjoys its horror undisturbed by the hope of remedy. It would only be necessary to enact that no burial Bhould take place before recourse had been had to some simple test—such as opening an important vein—and the risk of premature interment would be vanished; and yet no one thinks of making that a sine qua non to the granting of a death certificate. We do not allow people to be buried until a doctor has certified the cause of death, but we, in many cases, practically allow the death to be assumed, and do not insist that a certain-medical ritual shall be gone through in order to insure that death has really taken place.No doubt in many cases—nay, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine oases in ten thousand-the opening of a vein (if that would be the ultimate teat; for ou this ter we, as laymeu, can of course offer no opinion worth having) would be the merest formality; but every now and then some snoh simple formality would save a life, and possibly prevent the unconscious infliction of the most awful torture of which the human mind can conceive. Of course it can be said that the danger of burying alive grossly exaggerated. Indeed, there are many men who stoutly deny that it exists at all as a danger which can reasonably be taken into account. These men class it with the risk of the earth being baked brown by a sudden increase of activity in the sun or by the impact of a comet. With this view we entirely disagree. We do not believe that there are very manyeases of burying alive, but we cannot doubt that a distinct percentage of cases takes place every year. The Science Notes of Tuesday’s Daily Chronicle contain a string of facts in regard to burial alive of a very horrible kind. One BtoTy is quoted from a medical monograph on the subject by Dr. Franz HartmaaD, of Boston. A young lady was actually preps red for the grave while conscious of all that was passing, yet, like a person in a nightmare, quite unable to stretch out her limbs, to cry, or to open her eyes. It was only when she perspired in her mental agony that the mourners suspected the true state of matters. Then she awoke and uttered a most pitiable shTiek. ” Here the fac t that the tran ce was not of the unconscious kind saved the woman’s life. If her brain had been entranced, as well as her body, she would not have been subject to the men tal agony which, acting on her tissues, gave warning of her state. Air. Williamson, a correspondent of the Daily Chroniole, points out that we need not go to America “for proofs of this ter rible danger, inasmuch as oases are not infrequently reported in the daily and weekly press at home.” The fol lowing, ha points out, are the titles of recent cases from well-known journals, “copies of which lie before me;” “Buried Alive,” “A Grewsome Narrative,” “PrematureBarial,” “Mistaken for Dead,” “A Woman’s Awful Experience,” “Almost Buried While Alive, ” “A Woman Buried Alive,” “Bevivica-tion After Burial, “A Lady Nearly Buried Alive, “Bounds From Another Coffin,” “The Dead Alive,” etc. That a person should be able to draw up this list from the newspapers of the last week or two is sufficiently remark able. These all allude to cases in which the discovery was actually nrade that death had not taken place. Can it be called sensational or imaginative to assert that there must have been as many or more cases in which the discovery was not made?As we have said above,'we do not see why it should not be part of the duty of the doctor who grants the death certificate to see that the person assumed to be dead is actually dead. Why should he not be called upon, first, to certify that he has made anexamination, and has come to the con-olusion, owing to' the fact that {ho blood is congealed, or that putrefaction has set in, or that is some other absolute indication, such as the discoloration of the skin of the abdomen, that death has taken place; and secondly, that death was duo to such and such a cause ? If thie were done, and if the doctor were obliged to state shortly, on the face of the certificate, what were the indications on which he based the assurance that death had taken plaoe, there would be little or no risk of burial alive. —London Spectator,
Newspaper Details
Connecticut Eastern News
Niantic, Connecticut, US
Tue, Dec 03, 1895
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Susanna S.
USA 11 Oct 2023
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Connecticut Eastern News
