Premature burial
Authors: Theodore Dalrymple
Journal: BMJ (2007)

Henry James once remarked that an excessive interest in the works of Edgar Allan Poe was the sign of a primitive sensibility: such as Baudelaire's, I suppose. I cannot but agree with James on this point, and I might add that Poe's prose style seems to me dense without depth and earnest without seriousness. 

One of Poe's preoccupations was shared by many people of his time, namely premature burial. Throughout the 19th century, and even into the beginning of the 20th century, books appeared about the danger of precocious interment, with advice as to how to avoid it. There was even a Society for the Prevention of Burial Before Death, which published many books and pamphlets; it made much of the fact that death was a difficult diagnosis, the subject of controversy among doctors. (Romeo and Juliet would not have been a tragedy without a mistaken diagnosis of death.) 

Indeed, the precautions against burial alive taken by Poe's narrator in the story “The Premature Burial” are precisely those recommended in Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented, second edition 1905, by William Tebb and Edward Perry Vellum MD. Tebb was not a doctor, but he was interested in such good causes as the abolition of slavery and the avoidance of premature burial, to which cause he gave the last years of his life. He was also the originator and propagator of the idea that leprosy was caused by smallpox vaccination, and wrote a lengthy treatise on this subject. Dr Vellum had been medical inspector of the US Army and became interested in the subject of premature burial after he nearly drowned, was given up for dead, and woke up just before his own interment. 

Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented is full of lurid stories that make the flesh creep: “In a small town in Prussia an undertaker, living in the limits of the cemetery, heard during the night the cries proceeding from within the grave in which a person had been buried on the previous day. Not daring to interfere without permission, he went to the police and reported the matter. When, after a great deal of delay, the required formalities were fulfilled and permission granted to open the grave, it was found that the man had been buried alive, but that he was now dead . . . he had skinned his hand and head in his struggles . . .” 

The narrator in Poe's story arranged a mechanism in the coffin in which he proposed to be buried that would release him on the faintest movement. Tebb and Vellum describe the apparatus invented by Count Karnice-Karnicki, who had once witnessed the premature burial of a Belgian girl. A mechanism in the coffin opened a tube to the outer air and raised a flag above the ground if the supposed corpse showed the slightest sign of life. And then there was the mortuary in Munich, a kind of purgatory for corpses, in which the corpses' fingers were attached for a few days to a bell that rang in an apartment inhabited 24 hours a day by an attendant. 

Was any of this necessary? Even now, a person occasionally comes to life at his own postmortem examination. Perhaps I was wiser than I knew when, as an exhausted houseman, a nurse phoned me from the ward in the middle of the night and said, “Doctor, I think Mr Jones is dead.” 

“Well,” I said, “if you're right, he'll still be dead in the morning,” and went back to sleep.