Buried alive : the terrifying history of our most primal fear
"Readers of Edgar Allan Poe's tales - just think of The Premature Burial - may comfort themselves with the notion that Poe must have exaggerated: surely people of the 1880s could not have been at risk of being buried alive? But such stories filled medical journals as well as fiction, and fear in the populace was high. It was speculated, from the number of skeletons found in horrible, contorted positions inside their coffins, that ten out of every one hundred people were buried before they were dead."
320 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780393049060, 9780756774721, 9780393322224, 039304906X, 0756774721, 039332222X
45100353
Miracles of the dead
The lady with the ring and the lecherous monk
Winslow the anatomist and Bruhier the horror monger
The eighteenth-century debate
Hospitals for the dead
Security coffins
The signs of death
Skeptical physiologists and raving spiritualists
The final struggle
Literary premature burials
Were people really buried alive?
Are people still being buried alive?