From the _Daily Chronicle_, September 19, 1895.
“Sir,--I infer from the following facts that numbers of persons are buried alive after being supposed to have succumbed to small-pox.
“Some years ago, at St. Paul’s, Belchamp, near Clare, a young man who had been down with the small-pox was pronounced to be dead, and was put into a coffin, which, fortunately, was left unclosed until after the bell began to toll for his funeral, when he rose and stepped out. He lived for many years after. In the same neighbourhood no less than three other similar cases occurred, saving that the undertakers were not so far forward in their work. Each of these would have been buried alive but for the facts that in one case the nurse, having suspicions, put a wine-glass over the mouth of the person (who had been already ‘laid out’), and on returning in a quarter of an hour found it dimmed with breath; and that in the other case the mother of a mother, who with her baby was declared by the doctor to be dead, had blankets heaped on them, and after a while had the satisfaction of seeing them revive. Two of these three persons are, I believe, still living, and would be just past middle-age. I enclose their names for your private perusal, that you may verify my statements if desired. The first-mentioned case happened about seventy years ago, but I heard of it from residents in the neighbourhood about forty years after it occurred.
“Nowadays as soon as a small-pox patient is supposed to be dead, he or she is enclosed in a coffin and hurried off to the church-yard or cemetery the ensuing night--at least this is the practice in country places. I have no doubt that many have been buried alive.--Yours faithfully,
Brigade-Surgeon W. Curran cites from the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, April, 1873, in his Eighth Paper, entitled “Buried Alive,” as follows:--
“On the 15th of October, 1842, a farmer who lived in the suburbs of Neufchâtel (Lower Seine) went to sleep in his hay-loft in the midst of some newly mown hay. As he did not get up at the usual hour the next morning, his wife went to call him, and found him dead. When the time for his funeral arrived, some twenty-four or thirty hours subsequently, those who were charged with the burial put the body on a bier, and having placed this on the ladder that communicated between the ground and the loft, they allowed it to slide down. All of a sudden one of the rungs of this ladder gave way, and the bier, falling through, was dashed violently on the pavement below. The shock, which might have been fatal to a live person, proved to be the ‘saving clause’ of our supposed dead one; and fortunately, too, the attendants had not, as so commonly happens in such contingencies, absconded; on the contrary, responding without delay to the requirements of the situation, they quickly realised the gravity of the crisis, and, unbinding the shrouds of the farmer, they soon restored him to consciousness and life. He was able, we are further told, to resume his ordinary duties in a few days afterwards.”[7]