Readers of Edgar Allan Poe's tales - just think of The Premature Burial - may comfort themselves with the notion that Poe must have exaggerated: surely people of the 1880s could not have been at risk of being buried alive? But such stories filled medical journals as well as fiction, and fear in the populace was high. It was speculated, from the number of skeletons found in horrible, contorted positions inside their coffins, that ten out of every one hundred people were buried before they were dead.
With over fifty illustrations, Buried Alive explores the medicine, folklore, history, and literature of Europe and the United States to uncover why such fears arose and whether they were warranted. Jan Bondeson looks at legends from the Renaisance of thieves awakening supposedly deceased women when they try to steal the women's jewelry, as well as people awakening on the way to their funerals or even later in the graveyard. He then looks at the bizarre nineteenth-century security coffins with bellropes or escape hatches, and the macabre waiting mortuaries for decaying corpses, as well as the writers who were inspired to use themes as premature burial in their work. Finally, he questions whether our medical criteria today for determining if someone is dead are truly reliable.
Industry Reviews
Grave matters are treated with wit and erudition in this study of premature burial throughout Western history, from physician Bondeson ("The London Monster", 2000, etc.)..When one 18th-century French proponent for burial reform wrote that "Death is certain, since it is inevitable, but also uncertain, since its diagnosis is sometimes fallible," he was living in a time when feather quill tickling, urine mouthwashing, and tobacco smoke enemas were all advocated as instruments in the precise diagnosis and certification of death. Bondeson's macabre study begins in European antiquity and moves swiftly through the medieval superstitions and Renaissance legends. The bulk of the text deals with the period from 1750 - 1900 in Europe and America, years that correspond with the development of Western medicine as we know it. The author, a doctor himself, exhumes some fascinating material - from the history of the German "Leichenhauser "(waiting mortuaries - where bells were tied to the fingers of corpses should they bestir and shake themselves back to life) to the literary and philosophical overtones of the French debate on accuracy in death certification. Quacks, eccentrics, and charlatans run as rampant as earnest medical reformers throughout Bondeson's account, while the forces of ambition and greed are as constant as those of fear and humanitarianism. He follows the history of premature interment up to the present day (yes, Virginia, cases of premature burial still occur), and one digressive chapter deals with the depiction of premature burial in art (particularly books and movies) from Edgar Allan Poe to Roger Corman. The impressive medical history uncovered by the author's thoroughgoing research is well-presented and somewhat better than his argument (which falls somewhat by the wayside) that the fear of premature burial was ever as widespread as he suggests..A necrobibliac classic (in the tradition of Nancy Mitford's "American Way of Death"): it may keep you up all night - not from fear but from fascination.. (Kirkus Reviews)
