Worried to Death
A few nights ago I finished reading the book Buried Alive*, which I found fascinating and informative and generally easy to read. One should note that it is, in addition, a comprehensive and credible work concerning the topic. Anyway, some things continue to puzzle me after closing the book on the last page. These are puzzlements not about the book, but about the human behavior it describes.
The most puzzling that I found occurred during the height of the fear-of-premature-burial anxiety that siezed Germany and France (mostly) roughly between 1750–1850. It was a time that saw a great deal of development in two main areas: "safety caskets" designed with various additions like breathing tubes, little bells to ring, hammers to break them open, or extra food, all just in case the unthinkable should happen; and "waiting mortuaries", mostly in Germany, buildings where corpses were put for a few days until putrefaction+ became obvious and death assured. Those in the waiting mortuaries usually had strings attached to toes and fingers so that bells would ring should they twitch so that assistance might rush in. Neither of these, though, is what troubles me.
Many people, fearing premature burial, put special provisions in their wills, thereby hoping to avoid a ghastly and terrifying fate. What surprised me was the nature of these provisions and what they said about the specific fear. I would have thought the fear would be fear of death, of being buried when one still had days left. However, it seems that the real fear was waking up inside a buried coffin and "dying again".
The distinction? Rather than specifying that their presumed corpses should be kept safely above ground until it was clear that they were actually corpses, many people specified things like:
- opening their arteries so that all blood might drain out;
- plunging a long needle into their heart; and/or
- cutting off their heads.
In other words, they asked that steps be taken that would make it absolutely certain that they were dead, rather than possibly alive and merely suffering from der Scheintod (the "death trance"). In other words: they were so afraid of being buried alive that they insisted on being definitively killed before burial.
I find that incomprehensible, but maybe not so surprising.
———-
* Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2001).
+At the time, the onset of decay was considered the most reliable — really, the only reliable sign of death. Figuring out when someone is dead is not so easy as it sounds. This period saw several prizes offered on the continent for someone to come up with a reliable, quick indicator of death. The first crude stethescopes were just appearing and the winning idea was the lack of a heartbeat, although this was not always unambiguous and took some time to win over adherents.
These days, brain-death is taken as the point of death, which leaves organ-donors in a better position (as it were) for their organs to be "collected" (the word used to be "harvested", but apparently it's considered too insensitive these days). For an account of this aspect, I can recommend: Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2004).
Curiously, I had just finished Stiff before taking up Buried Alive, which seemed a suitable successor.
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on Friday, 13 January 2006 at 03.59
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Every so often there's a story about someone presumed dead who's somehow found to be alive. No doubt there was a publicized case back in those days, dramatized by grapevine retellings with embellishments.
Many, many years ago, one of "The Twilight Zone" TV series stories was about a person in that predicament, completely paralyzed, written off as dead, yet really alive and conscious. Finally, after many white-knuckle moments for the audience, a single tear forms on the person's eyelid and begins to run down the cheek. Someone notices it and realizes the person must be alive. Incredibly powerful drama, and you know, I'm thinking it was but a half-hour long.