Fads are mysterious. They seem to arise like rogue waves in the sea – unpredictable, inexplicable. Fads suddenly sweep through a culture, sometimes wreaking havoc, and just as suddenly disappear – leaving, if we are lucky, no lasting record of their passage.
Such a wave swept through the Western world in the 1800s. Suddenly, people became obsessed with the danger of being – Buried Alive!! This fear tapped into several primordial anxieties; the basic fear of death, the common claustrophobic apprehension of being enclosed in small spaces, and the special fear of knowing that you are dying slowly in your own buried coffin.
Fear of burial alive became widespread in the nineteenth century – although it is not clear if the fear was justified. Justified or not, hundreds of cases were reported – especially in the tabloids - in which doctors mistakenly pronounced people dead. Victorians even organized a Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive and equipped their coffins with emergency devices should they awaken after burial. Edgar Allen Poe added to this fad – more like a low-grade societal hysteria – by writing his short story The Premature Burial published, posthumously in 1850.
Poe’s short story didn’t start the fad/craze – rather, he capitalized on what had already become a widespread fear. Society at the time was entering the scientific age and the scientists of the time tried to apply technology to deal with what was essentially an unreasonable fear. Two primary approaches evolved for dealing with this horrifying prospect:
- verifying death before burial
- having an escape plan after burial.
The eacape-plan-after-burial approaches included some obvious, fairly low tech approaches such as:
- providing shouting tubes, that went from the corpse’s mouth through the coffin and up through the earth to the headstone.
- cords tied to the body’s fingers and connected to bells or other sorts of alarms above ground.
The methods of verifying death before burial were not always so obvious – and were often bizarre. One of the more interesting approaches was proposed by a physician named Antoine Louis. Doctor Louis suggested testing life, or perhaps stimulating the vital life spark in the apparently dead person, by administering an enema of tobacco smoke. He used a powerful bellows connected to a series of pipes. One of the pipes of this remarkable apparatus was thrust through the anal sphincter of the apparently dead person; the other was connected, by way of the bellows, to a large furnace full of tobacco. The theory was that the tobacco smoke would stimulate the internal organs and awaken the patient, unless, of course, the patient was truly dead. Then they were simply smoked.
These smoke enemas were regularly used well into the nineteenth century, particularly in
Happily, this test has been long abandoned in favor of such things as measuring brain wave activity, but there is still a common phrase that survives and which most literally translates to "trying to get a reaction" out of somebody – this old smoke enema test is the source of the phrase, he’s blowing smoke up your ass.
There was another life-death test used during the 19th century that also involved bellows and sphincters but approached the problem from the opposite end. Some physicians of the day had observed that the sphincters of the intestinal tract relaxed upon death. They reasoned that this would open up a clear channel from top to bottom. So this life-death test consisted of inserting a nozzle into the throat of the patient/victim with the hose connected to a powerful air pump. Air would be forced down the throat and, if the patient/victim were dead, the air would pass through the several intervening sphincters and exit through the relaxed anal sphincter (along with any contents of the intestinal tract.) How would you like to be the coroner standing at the nether end verifying death when this technique was employed? Talk about your shitty jobs!
It is not clear if this method was ever or often used nor what was the expected reaction if the patient was not dead?
