Category: Health & Medicine
OF all the various forms of suspended animation and apparent death, trance and catalepsy are the least understood, and most likely to lead the subject of them to a premature burial; the laws which control them have perplexed pathologists in all ages, and appear to be as insolu...
IT is universally admitted that nothing is less certain than life; and if the reader will weigh the facts, which it has been the authors’ intention to understate rather than ove...
24. vii. 52; Plutarch, De sera numinis vindicta; Apuleius, Floridorum,lib. vi.; St. Augustine, De cura mortuorum; Thuanus (no ref.); Diomed Cornarus, Hist. admirand. (case of a Madrid lady who is supposed to have given birth to a child after she w...
5. CHAPTER V.ALMOST every intelligent and observant person you converse with, if the subject is introduced, has either known or heard of narrow escapes of premature burial within his or her...
22. CHAPTER XXI.OF all the various methods that have been suggested or introduced for the prevention of premature interment, none has been attended with such satisfactory results as the erectio...
13. CHAPTER XIII.THE absence of respiration is the most ordinary sign of death, but at the same time perhaps the one most likely to deceive. To ascertain whether breathing be entirely suspended,...
12. CHAPTER XII.THE idea commonly entertained is that with animal bodies there are only two possible conditions--either life or death; that the presence of one of these conditions implies the a...
19. CHAPTER XVIII.A SELECT COMMITTEE of the House of Commons, under the chairmanship of Sir Walter Foster, M.D., was appointed on March 27, 1893, to inquire into the subject of death-certificatio...
20. CHAPTER XIX.THE learned Dr. Vigné, of Rouen, who won the respect of his fellow-citizens during a long and honourable career, was for many years engaged in the study of this question, and pu...
9. CHAPTER IX.On February 9, 1896, I visited the Burning Ghat on the banks of the Ganges, Calcutta, where twenty bodies are reduced to ashes by fire daily. The corpse of an aged Hindu woman h...
4. CHAPTER IV.AT the sitting of the Paris Academy of Medicine, on April 10, 1827, a paper was read by M. Chantourelle, on the danger of hasty burial. This led to a discussion, in which M. Des...
3. CHAPTER III.THE following case of the jerboa, or jumping mouse, recorded last century by Major-General Thomas Davies, F.R.S., in the “Transactions of the Linnæan Society,”[3] will show how...
1. CHAPTER I.OF all the various forms of suspended animation and apparent death, trance and catalepsy are the least understood, and most likely to lead the subject of them to a premature bur...
21. CHAPTER XX.AMONGST the numerous suggestions made by correspondents in the press with a view of preventing live sepulture, none has been more frequently put forward than that of cremation....
2. CHAPTER II.CATALEPSY differs in some of its characteristics from trance, but the one is often mistaken for the other. It is not so much a disease as a symptom of certain nervous disorders,...
10. CHAPTER X.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 sign...
16. CHAPTER XVI.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 n...
6. CHAPTER VI.WHENEVER grave-yards have been removed, owing to the rapid expansion of towns, in America, or examined elsewhere, unmistakable evidences of premature burial have been disclosed,...
8. CHAPTER VIII.THOSE who are most subject to the various forms of death-counterfeit are persons whose vocations exhaust the nervous force faster than the natural powers of recuperation, and wh...
7. CHAPTER VII.THERE is a great and natural reluctance on the part of medical practitioners to admit that they have made mistakes in death-certification, particularly in any one of the various...
14. CHAPTER XIV.THE differences observed in the length of time that persons have remained in this condition depended, doubtless, upon the constitutional peculiarities of the patients--such as s...
11. CHAPTER XI.MANY of those who are most familiar with the phenomena of life and death, including celebrated physicians, men of science, and clergymen, knowing that all the ordinary signs of...
15. CHAPTER XV.THE following extracts from French, English, and American authorities, who have made the subject of premature burial one of patient research, show how the dead, or apparently de...
17. CHAPTER XVII.AN intelligent and observing correspondent writes to the author that “under the prevailing custom of embalming in vogue in the United States, it is almost impossible to have a l...
18. part i., p. 140, remarks thereon--“A mistake had no doubt been made inIn 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; no...