NEW YORK (Reuters) -- The very idea of being mistaken for dead and then "buried alive" has long been a source of morbid fascination for horror writers, tellers of tall tales, and the public at large. But experts say the living should have little fear of waking up "6 feet under."
A recently reprinted 1898 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) editorial reminds us of the peculiar fascination "premature burial" held for people in the last century. "In certain... European cities," the 19th century editors wrote, "this possibility is so fully credited that waiting vaults are guarded and watched mortuaries are kept up at public or private expense in the cemeteries, where all bodies are kept for a certain period before interment, so as to prevent any such occurrence."
Nonetheless, the editors remained skeptical that premature burials had actually ever occurred during their era. "With the modern methods of preservation of remains which are so often employed, living burial is impossible," they wrote, "and we do not hear of any accidental homicides brought about in this way."
Even if a person should be so unlucky as to be buried while unconscious, the editors pointed out that the average coffin contains so little oxygen that asphyxia would probably precede any return to full consciousness. This would eliminate the possibility of what the editors call that "long lingering death in hopeless horror" which so appealed to gothic writers.
Modern experts are even more emphatic that living burial remains a near-impossibility. Dr. Charles Hirsch, Chief Medical Examiner for New York City, admits that "every once in a while, there's a story in the newspaper about someone being pronounced dead by EMS (emergency medical services) who is subsequently found not to be dead two hours later. But I've never heard an allegation in my lifetime of someone being buried alive."
Hirsch notes that most of us today will die in hospitals or nursing homes surrounded by the trappings of modern technology -- machines like ECGs and EEGs, which are able to register cardiac and brain death.
And then, of course, there's all that postmortem activity to consider. Hirsch says that even if a mistake should be made at the death scene, the "corpse" in question doesn't just "go from there to the cemetery. They're transported, there's a funeral director, burial doesn't occur for quite some time." Finally, he says, the rigors of the embalming process effectively precludes the possibility of any life within the coffin.
Still, those of us who harbor fears of a conscious entombment could always turn to a device mentioned by the JAMA editors of yore. According to the 1898 editorial, a Parisian by the name of Mr. Carnis had recently invented an apparatus meant to be "attached to the coffin... (and) set in action by the least movement of the supposed corpse." Upon activation, the device sounds an alarm and "admits light and air to the buried person." The editors mused that Carnis' contraption had the added bonus of being cheap -- "its employment would only cost a slight rental," they noted, "and a few such apparatuses would suffice for a large cemetery."
SOURCE: The Journal of the American Medical Association (1898;30:273-274, reprinted JAMA 1998;279(3):182)
