of ordinary observers on such a point as this (that a person is really dead) is absolutely worthless. And, even medical evidence, unless the physician is a person of unusual knowledge and skill, may have little more value.” The British Medical Journal[70] remarks: “It is true that hardly any one sign of death, short of putrefaction, can be relied upon as infallible.” Sir Henry Thompson wrote: “It should never be forgotten that there is but one really trustworthy proof that death has occurred in any given instance, viz., the presence of a manifest sign of commencing decomposition.” And Professor P. Brouardel emphatically declares: “We are obliged to acknowledge that we have no sign or group of signs sufficient to determine the moment of death with scientific certainty in all cases.” Colonel E. P. Vollum, M.D., Medical Inspector of the United States Army, and Corresponding Member of the New York Academy of Sciences, who himself was upon one occasion almost buried alive, most emphatically declared that “even stoppage of the beating of the heart, and breathing, for a considerable time, with all other appearances of death, excepting decomposition, do not make it certain that a person is dead,” and he also added the terrible warning that “the suspended activity of life may return after the body has been interred.” It is unnecessary to enter into these painful cases of premature burial, but there is overwhelming evidence that such accidents were far from uncommon. Dr. Thouret, who was present at the destruction of the famous vaults of Les Innocens, told Mons. Desgenettes that there could be no doubt many of the persons must have been interred alive, since the skeletons were found in positions which showed the dead must have turned in their coffins. Kempner supplies similar particulars when describing disinterments which have taken place in New York and other districts of the United States, also in Holland and elsewhere.
The celebrated investigator. Dr. Franz Hartmann, collected particulars of more than seven hundred cases of premature burial and of narrow escapes from it, some of which occurred in his own neighbourhood. In his great work Premature Burial[71] he tells us of the terrible incident which happened to the famous French tragedienne, Mlle. Rachel, who on 3rd January, 1858, “died” near Cannes, and who was to be embalmed, but after the proceedings had commenced she suddenly
