We’re all afraid of something. Many people live with significant anxiety due to their fear of things such as heights, flying, public speaking, the number 8 for example (Octophobia - it’s a real thing). But one fear puts disproportionately more heebies in our jeebies: taphophobia, or the fear of being buried alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead. To a mad few, it may seem a genuine irrational fear (like omphalophobia - the fear of belly buttons) but at least some solace can be taken in the fact that it is exceedingly rare… right? There wouldn’t be an episode if that was the case!
Perhaps being trapped 6 feet under is more reality than nightmare. This was certainly the case in centuries past.
In the early 19th century, it was remarkably common for people to be accidentally buried alive owing to the fact that pronouncing death was quite tricky. It happened so frequently in fact, that some clever people came up with innovative escape coffins to help the poor buried people get out or at least signal their vigor.
Taphophobia was more than a simple phobia for our ancestors. Back then, the demarcation between life and death was blurred, and the thought of premature burial was enough to send chills down anyone's spine.
Life and death were the epicentre of many debates throughout the centuries, reflected in a variety of artistic, scientific, and commercial landscapes. From Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', caught in the throes of contemporary scientific theories on life and animation, to the mental horror encapsulated in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Premature Burial', the fascination with the theme of ambiguous death was unquestionable.
This fear of being buried alive was not completely unsubstantiated. It happened more than you’d like to think! With differing opinions and methods in detecting signs of definitive death, many instances emerged of individuals being mistakenly declared dead and subsequently buried (and as an interesting side note, this continues today. Bella Montoya woke up at her own funeral in June 2003 only to properly die a week later).
Back then, there was understandably a lot of discussion about how to know for certain whether someone was definitively dead. People were tired of their sleeping aunties being buried alive! One suggested method for testing whether a corpse was ready for burial in the 1600’s was to pour vinegar, salt or warm urine into their mouth. If they were asleep, they wouldn’t be for long! Other perfectly scientifically sound ideas were to put insects in the body’s ears or to cut the soles of the feet with razor blades. But the most definitive way was to trust your nose. Surely putrification offered certainty but came with the obvious impracticality of having to leave the body to rot somewhere.
Even with these (somewhat questionable) methods, there was still a lot of uncertainty over what defined life and death. This is where innovators such as Marie Constant Hippolyte Nicolle and Franz Vester decided that even if death wasn’t certain, survival could be. They each patented their own innovative designs of high-tech coffins, fitted with alarm systems, breathing portholes and even ladders so that if someone was mistakenly declared dead, they could see the light of day again.
Christian Henry Eisenbrandt of Baltimore patented a brilliant coffin design that was equipped with a complex lever and spring mechanism which was easy to operate, “even for a weakened man”. Advertisements for coffins featuring life-preserving features flooded the market, while jestful conversations surrounding the fear of being buried alive became a common occurrence. Voices from the medical community too echoed concerns over the premature burials, providing rave reviews in favour of these life-preserving solutions.
While our modern era with its advanced medical technologies has vastly reduced the fear of premature burial, the distinction between life and death is still a difficult one. After all even today, people continue to wake up in morgues and at their funerals, long after being declared dead.
Terrified of this happening to you? Go out with a definitive, in-no-uncertain-terms, bang or opt for cremation or taxidermy.
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[00:00:00] Rod: Taphophobia. An extreme condition of claustrophobia due to the fear of being buried alive as a result of an erroneous decision that death had occurred.
[00:00:09] Will: Look, phobia is a good word to describe an irrational fear of feathers. Stuff. Like, whatever your phobia of feathers is. I don't like feathers. They're not great and it's probably a little bit irrational. But a fear of being buried alive.
[00:00:23] Rod: After being erroneously declared dead.
[00:00:25] Will: I get if it ruins your life. But if you are in that box, it's okay to be afraid. It's totally okay. That's not a diagnosable thing.
[00:00:32] Rod: I wouldn't call it a phobia. It's like, that just seems rational to me.
[00:00:35] Over the centuries, many people fell into London's waterways for a variety of reasons. It's quite common. And a lot of these, to be fair, or at least a noteworthy number, let's say a noticeable amount were suicides. That's not the crux of this. Of course, most of these people couldn't swim.
[00:00:49] Will: Well, it's London. They're not a swimming people.
[00:00:52] Rod: They're not. They're not a water people really. They all, look water. Oops. I fell in it.
[00:00:55] Will: Well, they're a water people, but different type of water. they're a rain people. Not a swimming people.
[00:01:00] Rod: Luckily though, in the later 1700s or so, resuscitation techniques existed. Some of them worked.
[00:01:06] Will: Did they?
[00:01:06] Rod: Some of them worked. I'll poke you with my stick, sir or madam get up. The saying blowing smoke up your ass actually came from, it was a resuscitation technique,
[00:01:16] Will: for the record, happy to try. Do I need to be shaved? I guess.
[00:01:20] Rod: That's up to you.
[00:01:21] Will: If my butt's gone on camera, then I'm getting some makeup, it's what I'm saying. I'm like this is a makeup job.
[00:01:26] Rod: anal bleaching is the trick.
[00:01:27] Will: I don't know if I need to get that far.
[00:01:29] Rod: And the description I heard was, I know what you're thinking. And I'll tell you it's like a lit cigar. So anyway, some of the techniques actually worked, which is great. And one of them literally was blowing smoke up the date. That's not one that necessarily worked.
[00:01:43] Will: You can't bait and switch me like that. I thought you were going to say one of the, some worked and one of them worked was blown smoke.
[00:01:48] Rod: No, I'm not going to tell you that.
[00:01:49] Will: Who thinks, you know, there's a gentleman that has passed out. Here's what I'm going to do. Because to get the smoke in the arse, you've got to get a tight seal.
[00:01:58] Rod: Funnel.
[00:01:58] Will: Oh, that's boring. I thought this was more of a kissing situation.
[00:02:01] Rod: Look it can, you make it your own. Whatever saves lives, man.
[00:02:03] Will: kiss of life. Like I thought you had a cigar and then you gotta pucker up.
[00:02:06] Rod: Let's see where this goes, if you survive. So 1774, late 1700s, a couple of doctors set up the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned.
[00:02:17] Will: Great name. It's too long for a band but I would join the society.
[00:02:21] Rod: But for an old novel it very quickly changed to the Royal Humane Society. They didn't keep that name for long. But it was motivated by this stuff. So their main goals were to publish information to help people resuscitate others. And they would also pay people for attempting to save lives and you get a bonus if it actually worked.
[00:02:37] Will: Wow. Just like a bounty in the public. Try to save a life. Here's a shilling.
[00:02:42] Rod: Actually save a life. Shilling and a half. What's that? Threepence, ha'penny.
[00:02:46] Will: Well, you can't reward it too much.
[00:02:47] Rod: No, because we know what will happen. I wish that story was this.
[00:02:51] Will: There was a plague of life saving.
[00:02:54] Rod: Exactly. I saved another one. Ah, that's the same person three times today.
[00:02:58] Will: There is that dog in New York that time, it got famous for, it would it snatch people's hats and throw them in the river and then swim out and get the hat and then get a reward.
[00:03:07] Rod: Yeah. He's a pork chop. This is fucking great. So this was their goal, to do that. And it got so successful, at least noticeable that there was an annual procession of those who were raised from the dead by the society's sussetry methods, which is cool. So one famous, what appeared to be a suicide attempt, which was thwarted by members of the society, folk involved. This woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley, dove in the water. She jumped off the Putney Bridge into the Thames, apparently in the depth of depression.
[00:03:35] She was not keen on being alive. Jumped in and she later complained, I have only to lament that when the bitterness of death was passed, I was inhumanely brought back to life and misery. So she wasn't happy.
[00:03:47] Will: Yeah. I understand.
[00:03:48] Rod: As far as she was concerned, she was actually dead. And so as the thinking ran at the time, she was literally brought back to life.
[00:03:55] Will: Okay. I was there. I had made it to the other place. Yeah. And then you fucking took it away.
[00:03:59] Rod: Yeah. So stories of resurrection by the society played really nicely into a broader public concern, which was it was very hard to tell when a person was actually dead. When are and are you not dead? So for many, resuscitation seemed a lot more like resurrection or even reanimation and it was blowing minds. We've made people alive. So I came across this snippet about the whole Mary Wollstonecraft, et cetera, in an article by Sharon Rustin called The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Until I read this article, I'd never realized three things. One, how much Frankenstein was a product of contemporary bleeding edge science and philosophical thinking of the time.
[00:04:40] Like I kind of had an idea, but the whole idea of life and death and where the line was was really contemporary. And so she captured this. The second thing, how widespread the discomfort about not being sure when someone was actually dead and it led to, at least for some particular kind of phobia.
[00:04:57] And third, how the whole situation showcased a truly shutter worthy market for a solution to mitigate the most horrifying consequence of not being able to tell for certain if someone was finally properly and for reals dead..
[00:05:11] Will: Welcome to the wholesome show podcast that believes all wrongs can be righted by the whole of science. All wrongs.
[00:05:17] Rod: Every damn one. Yep. We agree.
[00:05:19] Will: Hi, I'm Will Grant.
[00:05:20] Rod: I'm Rudels G. Lamberts. 1814. Mary Wollstonecraft Jr. started doing some adult hugging with a poet philosopher guy called Percy Bysshe shelley. So she became Shelley. Apparently, she became with child at some point in the same year.
[00:05:35] Will: Inside or outside of wedlock?
[00:05:37] Rod: Oh, very outside. Shelley was well and truly married. Well and truly.
[00:05:40] Will: So, outside of someone else's wedlock too?
[00:05:42] Rod: Poet. Poet.
[00:05:43] Will: Are poets allowed special dissertation?
[00:05:44] Rod: Supposed to. At the time. This is a romantic period of literature and so forth. So, that was romance.
[00:05:49] Will: One must fuck, darling.
[00:05:50] Rod: Oh, you want romance. Here's romance. Apparently, she lost her virginity to Percy during a secret tryst either near or on the mother's grave
[00:05:58] Will: apart from the mother bit, like apart from the mother, take a grave. I mean, that's cool. Like you're fucking a poet on a grave. Like, as long as everyone is keen on the concept I think losing your virginity on a grave is pretty cool. That's my opinion.
[00:06:12] Rod: That's fair. Look, I remember mine. Cause I was on the space shuttle.
[00:06:15] Will: Yeah. Well, there you go.
[00:06:16] Rod: Otherwise I would not have remembered.
[00:06:17] Will: No, exactly.
[00:06:18] Rod: So as you already picked, Shelly was of course, still married. Of course, she got pregnant.
[00:06:22] Will: So hang on. He's married. And he's like, I want to go check out your mother's grave.
[00:06:25] Rod: And this is what sex is. Rumpty tuttly pum.
[00:06:29] Will: What is the sequence here? Your mother's grave. That's weird.
[00:06:34] Rod: Yeah. I don't know if that was deliberate. I don't know if it was just like, it should be on your mum.
[00:06:37] Will: Are they picking any grave here? Let's go find some graves. Oh, fuck. It's my mum's grave.
[00:06:41] Rod: And then she's like, I want to do it in a graveyard. And he goes, me too. But there's a stipulation. So she got pregnant and the child was born prematurely and died. But they forged ahead. Mary and Percy, they married in 1816. So two years later, and that was easy to do because his first wife killed herself. You know, you know how it is.
[00:07:01] So during the summer of that year, 1816, the couple and Mary's stepsister, I dunno why, went and hung out near Geneva with Lord Byron who you know, apparently was some kind of poet or something.
[00:07:12] Will: Yeah. And an island around swimmer. Swam around some islands
[00:07:16] Rod: he did. And the other person there was John William Polidori, who was a British writer and physician and maybe the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. So while they were hanging out, one of the big topics of conversation was about the nature of life. Like what's it made of? And can you kick it off?
[00:07:31] Will: So they're stoners.
[00:07:32] Rod: Oh, big time. Big time.
[00:07:33] Will: Let's write some poetry.
[00:07:34] Rod: They're boiling hashish in a bowl and taking an army spoon of it and gobbling it down and then going, let's have a conversation. 1831 preface to Frankenstein, apparently Shelley mentions how discussions on this became really quite interesting. And so they're talking about the whole electrical stimulation of dead muscles into life, galvanism.
[00:07:50] Will: Yep. Yep. So I can imagine. So galvanism what year is that happening?
[00:07:55] Rod: A number of decades earlier
[00:07:56] Will: but enough, they'd be thinking about it. So a frog put some electricity through it and it moves
[00:08:01] Rod: or the corpse of a criminal who's been executed. But either way you zap
[00:08:04] Will: one of the two. And they twitch. There's a little bit where you go, Oh, no, I get it. The spark of life.
[00:08:11] Rod: Yep. Absolutely. And so obviously this influenced her story, Frankenstein. And so there's a nice quote in this preface. Many along with the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, her husband, to which I was a devout, but nearly silent listener. The lady's got to shut up.
[00:08:26] Will: No, but I bet also those two, I imagine Lord Byron. I imagine he wanks off like crazy. Like he's just fucking chat chat. He's like the early 19th century equivalent of the guy that brings out the guitar at every party. Like he's stop, everybody stop, I have a poem. I have a poem.
[00:08:44] Rod: I'm going to improve you. I shall improve you now.
[00:08:48] Will: But yeah, I imagine she doesn't get a word in.
[00:08:50] Rod: No, not with two poets in the room. And so during one of these conversations, various philosophical doctrines were discussed and among others, the nature of the principle of life, whether there was any probability of it ever being discovered and communicated, whatever the, what is life and how can we work it out. Like that toaster seems dead. Let's make it alive. It went on, perhaps a corpse could be reanimated. Galvanism had given a token of such things. Perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with a vital warmth. I mean, how's that got anything to do with Frankenstein? Shocking.
[00:09:25] So she goes on to say, Night waned upon this talk. When I placed my head on the pillow, my imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness, far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw with eyes shut but acute mental vision the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
[00:09:46] I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy half vital motion.
[00:09:54] Will: She's imagining this.
[00:09:55] Rod: So she basically went off to bed and dreamed Frankenstein. It's cool.
[00:10:00] Will: It's a great dream. It's great. It's a great dream.
[00:10:02] Rod: Like I usually have post apocalyptic dreams, but she has Frankenstein dreams. So also around this time in the years that we're building up to her writing Frankenstein, there was a quote, very public debate on the nature of life itself. Two surgeons had a yak, John Abernathy and William Lawrence. You know, we both know them, but others may not.
[00:10:20] They both had links with Shelleys, both Mary and Percy. So Percy had read and quoted one of Abernathy's books and some of his, you know, poems and Lawrence had been the Shelley's doctor. So they had a connection in the family. So in the debate, questions are asked about how to define life and how living bodies were differentiated from dead and or inorganic bodies. Like what is the thing? And we still struggle over what is life. That is not something a biologist can easily tell you.
[00:10:48] Will: Or what is alive, which is slightly different. Related questions. But
[00:10:51] Rod: yeah, so Abernathy said, look, life did not depend on the body structure, the way it was organized or arranged, et cetera. It existed separately. It was a material substance, a vital principle.
[00:11:01] Will: There is some thing that is life
[00:11:03] Rod: Added to the body. It wasn't part of, it was sort of soul ish, et cetera, that kind of gist. Lawrence said, this is ridiculous. Life is simply the working operation of all the body's functions and the sum of its parts.
[00:11:14] Will: Yeah. It's all the stuff that we can see.
[00:11:16] Rod: Yeah. It's just the meat and the processes. Lawrence's ideas, of course, were too radical. That was a radical idea.
[00:11:22] Will: Just before we go on, just for the record, where do you stand on this debate?
[00:11:26] Rod: I would like to think there's something additional, but I think it's probably just a by product of the special meat
[00:11:32] Will: just meat arranged in the right way.
[00:11:34] Rod: Yeah. Meat does this too. I'd love to think of the first one, but. I find it hard to believe
[00:11:39] Will: and life being different from consciousness or anything like that, like the higher order stuff, the lower life.
[00:11:44] Rod: What is it that animates basically? Why does the toaster not move?
[00:11:48] Will: You know, you know, animates is a good word there because one of the principles of life is that activity, just doing something. It is, it's not a rock. It's a step above . Fungus is great because it is animated to grow and to consume and to something.
[00:12:02] Rod: Yep. And all the arguments, self replicating some kind of motor, blah, blah, blah. We still haven't nailed it, but this is about the, like, what's the force? What's the essence of life was the real question though.
[00:12:12] Will: It is prune juice.
[00:12:13] Rod: Oh, we've done the episode on crapping yourself well, no matter what the situation. So basically Lawrence, so like, you know, you're a radical freak. This kind of suggests there isn't a soul. So he was forced to withdraw. He wrote a book on all these lectures he'd given on it. He was forced to withdraw this from the public domain, resign his hospital post.
[00:12:32] Will: Yeah, because your ideas about life are too much.
[00:12:35] Rod: No soul, therefore you're a fucking monster. Get out. But he was reinstated after he publicly denounced his views.
[00:12:43] Will: But thanks totalitarianism. Like, you know, if you have a wrong opinion, you lose your job
[00:12:47] Rod: and prove it's wrong. We can't, we just don't like it.
[00:12:51] Will: Yeah, no, literally on a topic that you can't prove.
[00:12:54] Rod: We just don't like it. But what it showed was this whole argument and this debate about it showed that this is controversial and a live debate. What is life and death, et cetera. And it was, you know, further inspiration for her final novel, Frankenstein. So along the way, the Shelleys had two more kids, both died.
[00:13:10] Will: Oh. Like, I mean, I know it's the times, but it's just be nicer to have some success.
[00:13:16] Rod: One did survive, there was a fourth who did survive. Percy jr. This one's going to live. I'm not calling Percy.
[00:13:23] Will: Good old fourth time's the charm.
[00:13:24] Rod: That's what they say. But it seems like the way they talked about their experiences, the Shelleys, you know, they had a lot of close experiences with death and quite traumatic death. It revealed a lot about their thoughts about life, death, and the possibility of reanimation.
[00:13:38] So, Percy wrote of William Shelley, one of the dead kids. His last illness, he said, By the skill of the physician, he was once reanimated after the process of death had actually commenced. And he lived for four days after that time.
[00:13:51] So this language reflected a view that was really quite common that people could kind of die and be restored to life and it was quite common.
[00:14:00] Will: We work with an assumption from Baywatch to hospital bed, know that people go through a process that is dying but they haven't been gone for ages. They're gone for a minute sort of thing. And we can grab them and we can bring them back, drag them back to life. And you know, in one principle you would go no. The life is always there. It was on the way out, but you caught it before the bottom and off they go. Yeah. The other one is no we kickstarted it again. We got the motor to go again.
[00:14:29] Rod: We do have an element of it and we don't know for sure what it is, but these guys seem to be a lot more like you, you literally dead. Then not dead. The recently drowned, et cetera, literally died. And then we're on undead.
[00:14:41] Will: I totally accept that they had this, but I don't think society now is far from that. I think if someone told the story of, you know, like the near death experience or beyond that, you know, I drowned and was, you know, have my heart restarted or something like that.
[00:14:55] And people told it as, you know, I was brought back from death. People would be like, no that's within the realm of what we talk about.
[00:15:02] Rod: You were still pretty much alive.
[00:15:03] Will: Well, no, I don't know if we are. I think a lot of people are very happy with the idea. No, you skipped into the realm of dead, but you're only there for a minute and then you popped back out again. Which one are you for that? So in the modern world.
[00:15:13] Rod: I prefer that.
[00:15:14] Will: But which one do you believe?
[00:15:15] Rod: Not that.
[00:15:17] Will: So you reckon once you're dead. But you are not fully dead if you have drowned and then had your heart started.
[00:15:22] Rod: I feel like it sounds too good to be true. That's my problem. It's cause I'm a, not pessimists. We're realists.
[00:15:28] Will: No, you're not.
[00:15:29] Rod: No, I agree with you. I agree with you.
[00:15:30] Will: Pessimists are idiots. Optimists are realists. That's the truth.
[00:15:33] Rod: Everyone says that. Yeah. That's why it's on the t shirts.
[00:15:39] Will: I would wear that t shirt.
[00:15:40] Rod: I would too, actually, which we, which you get them. That's going to be the first wholesome show slogan t shirt. So this whole language about the died and then came back, et cetera, it was very common. And so Sharon Rushton, the one that the woman who wrote about Frankenstein, et cetera, and life and death in that novel, Frankenstein, Mary's language, it followed contemporary scientific language, where she describes things like episodes of fainting.
[00:16:03] So she says, for example, when Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein creates the creature, he collapses because he's a nervous fellow and he describes it as a state of lifelessness. And then he is restored to life by another character in the novel. And then there's another one called Elizabeth. She fainted and was restored with extreme difficulty when she again lived, it was only to weep and sigh. And this is the arguing. It wasn't poetic license with the notion of fainting being like fainted dead away, but like literally in a sense, unconsciousness or altered states were in a sense, actual death. Non life.
[00:16:35] Will: I've definitely heard that and heard it in modern times of people saying no, you are, you know, you're closer into death and you're in a state that is like death. I've heard people say being asleep is death ish. And it's like, really, we do it a lot.
[00:16:52] Rod: Again, though. I hope that's true. Cause that means death is something rather than nothing. I'm not a fan of nothing. I've seen nothing. It's boring. I don't want to be bored.
[00:17:01] Will: Nothing is the final beauty.
[00:17:05] Rod: I don't know if that's true.
[00:17:07] Will: Just hold it as you go. Listener, if you happen to be on the journey, hold it, hold the idea that you know, the nothing is the final beauty.
[00:17:15] Rod: At the time, determining whether someone is properly dead was a matter of serious debate. And I know we still have discussions, but this was a lot more kind of brutal and black and white.
[00:17:23] Will: Breathe in a mirror.
[00:17:25] Rod: Yep. Stab you in the eye with a needle.
[00:17:27] Will: Nice. Nice. Listen to your ticker a little bit and then we're done. We'll pick your leg up and drop it.
[00:17:32] Rod: Oh, it fell. You're dead. So the French encyclopedia included two kinds of death.
[00:17:38] Will: Of course, the French two kinds. The little death?
[00:17:40] Rod: No, not that. Incomplete and absolute. He's dead, but he hasn't quite finished. Complete your death, you lazy bastard. So they also added in this encyclopedia there that there is no remedy for death is an axiom widely admitted. We, however, are willing to affirm that death can be cured.
[00:17:59] So incomplete and absolute death. So 1817, one of the doctors of the Shelleys, they seem to have a lot of doctors, a guy called James Currie. He wrote about how to tell the difference between absolute and apparent death. So quite similar, incomplete and absolute, but he talked about absolute and apparent death. So apparent death states what they would call often suspended animation, like fainting coma and sleeping.
[00:18:23] Will: Yeah. And they would grade them a little bit cause sleeping being the light.
[00:18:27] Rod: Yeah, but they're still like, this is apparent death at some level and absolute death could only be confirmed according to Currie, once there was putrefication of the body.
[00:18:37] Will: Okay. Once you can cut them up and they don't complain.
[00:18:39] Rod: Or they stink. Bit smelly, probably dead.
[00:18:44] Will: I don't want to wait around that long. But maybe this is why they were happy leaving Aunt Josephine sitting in the chair for a while longer to check.
[00:18:52] Rod: We're going to get to that. Not Aunt Josephine. She doesn't appear. So here's from an ad that reinforces how this was in the zeitgeist of the time. As most physiologists have agreed that there is no one certain sign of death, great difficulty must arise in distinguishing between a living and a dead body. Many cases are recorded where such difficulty has been great and perplexing.
[00:19:16] Many of the usual signs, for some reason emphasized of death, Have been present and yet the person proved to be merely in a state of suspended animation. Other instances have taken place where neither the cessation of the pulse and breathing, nor the coldness of the body, nor the want of efflux of blood from a vein, nor the insensibility to stimuli, nor relaxation of muscles, nor disagreeable odor from the body could be trusted, as indicators of death.
[00:19:45] Will: I've met people where disagreeable odors from the body, definitely alive. It's disagreeable, but they're definitely alive. Yeah.
[00:19:54] Rod: As it goes on, all these signs have been present and yet the persons have recovered after possessing them for some days. This is an ad for a thing, as I said, I'll go into in a moment, but basically deliberations about death and not death were much more than philosophical musings too, because they were compelling and practical reasons to think about the whole absolute versus apparent death because according to a scholarly journal article, which I actually read, unusual
[00:20:18] Will: that's good of you. Give it to me.
[00:20:20] Rod: The literature history, medical and popular provides many examples of people being buried alive.
[00:20:26] Will: Well, indeed.
[00:20:29] Rod: But I know we've had, you know, chats about this occasionally.
[00:20:31] Will: I know it's your favorite thing.
[00:20:32] Rod: I fucking love the idea. Nothing delights me more than the idea of waking up in a box unable to move.
[00:20:37] Will: He's being sarcastic.
[00:20:39] Rod: How do you know? Was it my posture?
[00:20:42] Will: Look I don't want it, I don't want it, but you know. I'm like, well, at least you got a challenge in front of you. like, you're not worrying about your emails. And you're not thinking about what's for dinner tonight. You're like, can I karate punch my way out?
[00:20:55] Rod: That is the upside of mortal threat. Nothing else matters. What matters now, I forgot to buy shoelaces.
[00:21:00] Will: And then you go, hopefully suffocate, hopefully dehydrate to death. Oh no, I'm just going to starve.
[00:21:05] Rod: I'm going to scream until I pass out and then don't know anything else.
[00:21:09] Will: Yeah, look, it doesn't worry me that much. Spontaneous human combustion. Now you can't do anything about that.
[00:21:16] Rod: Well, and it's likely.
[00:21:17] Will: Like it just happens. Whereas being buried alive, you're like, well, I can try.
[00:21:21] Rod: Well, let's get into that. So apparently, according to this journal article, many such stories about people being buried alive are unreliable. Case histories have also been published in respectable scientific journals. For example, 1877, a woman in Naples, she was believed dead. She was buried with all the formal rights, all the things. After a few days
[00:21:39] Will: that doesn't confirm that she's dead though. That's just means that went through a ceremony.
[00:21:42] Rod: Yes. Okay. After a few days they opened her tomb or the tomb to bury another body because she's above ground. Found that the woman's clothes were torn to pieces on her body and there were obvious injuries inflicted in an attempt to break free. So she wasn't dead yet, but she was then by the time they got there, she was dead. That's how she actually died.
[00:22:02] Will: Here's a way to confirm everyone's dead. Bury him so they can't wake up.
[00:22:06] Rod: Like fucking horrifying. And my favorite from this article, the corpse of the German monk, Thomas à Kempis back in 1300s. Oh, actually it was the 1400s when this happened. The corpse had splinters under its fingernails and there were scratches on the inside of the lid of the coffin. I don't know why they looked, but they looked. It was believed that he'd been accidentally buried alive and for this reason, the canonization process did not progress.
[00:22:33] Will: Oh, no! They took it away?
[00:22:35] Rod: Because a saint, if they were prematurely buried, would not have fought death.
[00:22:39] Will: That's fucking bullshit.
[00:22:40] Rod: Can you imagine that?
[00:22:41] Will: No, that's unfair. You're saintly all the way. And you're like, there's a little kid. I've got to rescue a little kid in a tree. Like, and I'm going to claw my way out. And they're like, no, you can't have sainthood anymore because you tried to rescue the little kid in the tree.
[00:22:54] Rod: You resisted death, therefore you're not saint worthy.
[00:22:56] Will: That's bullshit. Give him a sainthood. Popey.
[00:22:58] Rod: Thomas à Kempis. Yeah. Put him up.
[00:23:00] Will: Put him up. This is unfair
[00:23:02] Rod: but you don't get to say that because you're not a Catholic dignitary.
[00:23:04] Will: No, but I like the Catholics. So they're going to, they're going to take me in at Sainthood level.
[00:23:11] Rod: So also in this article they refer to a book called The Corpse History. Written by a woman called Christine Quigley in 1966.
[00:23:18] And here's some fun facts, 1896, an American funeral house manager estimated that nearly 2 percent of exhumed people were no doubt victims of a state of apparent rather than absolute death.
[00:23:31] Will: Two percent. You know, if I, if you'd have said, give me a guess, I'd say one in a hundred thousand.
[00:23:37] Rod: Nope.
[00:23:39] Will: Two percent. One in 50. One in 50. You know what that means? You definitely know someone who'd be buried alive. That's cool.
[00:23:49] Rod: 1905. So shuffling forward a few years, English reformer, William Tebb, I don't know what he reformed, but this is from this article, collected accounts of premature burial and it included 219 cases of near live burial, 149 cases of actual live burial.
[00:24:07] Will: How? How is he, what is his science on this? Is he digging them up and doing a count?
[00:24:12] Rod: He asked, I don't know. It's 1905 science. It doesn't even work.
[00:24:15] Will: Yeah. Yeah. He asked people, what do you reckon Dolores was alive when she was buried or not?
[00:24:19] Rod: Was there screaming during the funeral and did it come from within the box?
[00:24:23] Will: Look, okay. Yeah, sure.
[00:24:24] Rod: 10 cases of live dissection. My favorite two cases of awakening while being embalmed and going back to that ad I mentioned earlier, just to get a feel for this whole life death problem, the ad for the thing that I will tell you about in a moment. In consequence of the difficulty of establishing any positive unerring signs of death, many individuals have been consigned to the grave before they're actually dead.
[00:24:55] It's a truth too well tested to admit a doubt. This just happened. This is in the late 1800s. The writer might multiply a massive evidence in proof of his assertion, but we'll refer to well authenticated instances of resurrection with after interment as published in the anatomy of the celebrated Winslow and in the history of Medicine of Leclerc.
[00:25:16] I don't know who these people are. So the point is the celebrated Kalmuth says that a very honest woman continued three days without any sign of life, but every supposed indefinite symptoms of death. So she lay there and they're like, no signs of life. Clearly dead.
[00:25:30] Will: And an honest woman who wouldn't lie about it. She ain't tricking us into three days of lying still.
[00:25:33] Rod: I'm not lying. I'm dead as shit.
[00:25:35] Will: Like, like a fraud. Like, you know, con artist. They could fake Three days pretending to be dead.
[00:25:40] Rod: So everyone at the expiration of 36 hours insisted that she was dead and her funeral was prepared. Relatives steadily opposed it for some reason. Now she does this all the time. This is mom. After the third day, she recovered and lived a long time afterwards.
[00:25:55] So it's telling a story. This is in the buildup to a product they're trying to sell. And it goes on to tell another story, which I won't go into from a Baltimore newspaper of an instance of resurrection after internment, which is my fave. So with all this learned and general debate about when someone was actually dead.
[00:26:13] Then we have the scientific distinction between apparent and absolute death. The literature and poetry of the romantic period that showcased loved this stuff. They loved talking about death and weird morbid stuff. Ads for systems that refer to people being resurrected after internment makes complete sense to me that medical and scholarly types started to note cases of taphophobia.
[00:26:33] Will: What?
[00:26:35] Rod: An extreme condition of claustrophobia due to the fear of being buried alive as a result of an erroneous decision that death had occurred.
[00:26:42] Will: Look, phobia is a good word to describe an irrational fear of feathers whatever your phobia of feathers is. I don't like feathers. They're not great. And it's probably a little bit irrational, but a fear of being buried alive
[00:26:56] Rod: after being erroneously declared dead
[00:26:58] Will: I get if it, it ruins your life. No, but if you are in the box, it's okay to be afraid. It's totally okay. That's not a diagnosable thing.
[00:27:07] Rod: I wouldn't call it a phobia. That's like, that's just seems rational. There are many examples of what people thought was a cases of this. And one of them was Edgar Allen Poe, who was obsessed with it. He wrote a novel in 1884, the premature burial in a newspaper in Philadelphia, this article that talks about these problems goes on to mention stories, treaties, authors, et cetera, who make the case for this phobia existing and being particularly noteworthy during this period.
[00:27:34] No surprise, given everything else what's live, what's dead, people being buried alive dah. So I got no problem with it, but I don't want to dwell on the problem. I want to get into innovative solutions.
[00:27:44] Will: You're a solutions guy!
[00:27:46] Rod: I'm a solutions guy. Like, how do we help? So, suggestions from 1600 to 1700. How do you check a corpse? Make sure they're absolutely dead.
[00:27:56] Will: Chop the head off.
[00:27:57] Rod: Yeah, but that's kind of killing them.
[00:27:59] Will: Well, it'll tell you if they're alive or dead.
[00:28:00] Rod: That's true because you're like, well, it must be now. Here are the things. Things like this. Pour vinegar, salt or warm urine into the mouth.
[00:28:07] Will: Yeah, of course I was thinking the warm urine.
[00:28:10] Rod: Piss in his mouth, bro.
[00:28:11] Will: That's going to wake him up.
[00:28:12] Rod: If he doesn't sputter then he's dead. That's one. Put insects in their ears.
[00:28:22] Will: What kind of insects are we talking here? Like, is it a burrowing insect or like a biting insect or like a friendly insects. Put a whole rhinoceros beetle in his ear, see if he wakes up then.
[00:28:33] Rod: The other one was cut the soles of the feet with razor blades. That'll get me going. Especially not the tough bits of the feet in the arch where you can't harden it.
[00:28:40] Will: So gradually work up to cutting their head off.
[00:28:42] Rod: Still not moving. Okay. Do a little bit more.
[00:28:44] Will: Probably cut the shins. Take the kneecaps off.
[00:28:46] Rod: Yep. In between the genitals and the bum hole.
[00:28:48] Will: Yeah. Yeah. Obviously do that one. Take out their whole pelvis.
[00:28:51] Rod: Cut the pelvis. Yeah. What's next? It's the pelvis obviously
[00:28:55] Will: That's how you check if someone is alive, like you've done the other things first.
[00:28:58] Rod: Can you remove their pelvis?
[00:28:59] Will: Easily. Like that's an easy bone to remove. That's what they often say. Easiest bone to remove. Barely connected to anything.
[00:29:11] Rod: And then they broke their pelvis. I'm like no, I'm out. I'm out. There's no thing I'd like to break less. I think I'd rather have a skull fracture. So also another option was what James Curry said earlier was, you know, the evidence of absolute death is only unequivocal when there are signs of putrefaction. And look, I'm very confident that's a great indicator. Like I've no, no question, but it's fucking gross. And the practicalities of it, leaving people lying around until they rot.
[00:29:35] Will: Oh, and you can't write to describe what the stink is. Like it's a little bit subjective.
[00:29:40] Rod: It's true. Really stinky. Therefore dead. So what's the solution? It's really obvious. You make tricked out, souped up coffins. Here are three. So one patent device, 1899 from a woman called Mary Nicolle, the movement of the head of the apparently dead person drives a lever system connected to an alarm.
[00:30:03] And she writes, I have devised an improved coffin, which permits the body to be kept during a certain time until decomposition sets in and moreover enables the person enclosed in the coffin to give a warning if there has been a mistake. So you got the head there, right? Yeah. So if you bang your head, a bell rings.
[00:30:20] Will: Okay. That's an awesome patent. I just got to say a little bit of moral hazard here. Moral hazard. Well, moral hazard being that A device like this might allow people to make worse decisions because what you're doing here is suddenly people are like, ah, don't worry. Don't worry if she's on the fence, put her down. She'll ring the bell with her head. And if she doesn't ring the bell, it's fine, dude, it's fine. I, this might encourage bad behavior.
[00:30:45] Rod: No humans aren't like that.
[00:30:49] Will: Like I don't mind the idea and you don't mind the idea of being able to bang the bell, ring the bell.
[00:30:53] Rod: No and the beauty of that one is you could do it if it was just a spasm too.
[00:30:57] Will: What if it makes you 30 percent more likely to be buried?
[00:31:00] Rod: Oh, I'm against it.
[00:31:00] Will: There you go.
[00:31:01] Rod: I want to get the insects in the ear. Slash my feet with razor blades.
[00:31:05] Will: Could you do a bell beforehand?
[00:31:07] Rod: Yeah. Second one. 1868. The nature of this invention consists in placing on the lid of the coffin and directly over the face of the body within a square tube which extends from the coffin up through and over the surface of the grave. So tunnel.
[00:31:22] Will: Yeah. Let all the gross smells out.
[00:31:24] Rod: The tube has a ladder.
[00:31:26] Will: I thought this was like a breathing tube, so you're not really burying them. It's a submarine.
[00:31:32] Rod: Yeah, it is a submarine with a very big conning tower.
[00:31:35] Will: Like, you're not burying them. You're just,
[00:31:37] Rod: well, you are, but you're giving them an escape hatch. Then you got a cord, which is placed on the hand of the person in the coffin. The other end of the cord is attached to a bell at the top.
[00:31:48] Will: Oh, okay. Oh, so this is how you can get down, not get up?
[00:31:53] Rod: But also if like you kind of move a bit, your arm moves and it goes jingle, which says not dead or at least spasming wildly.
[00:32:00] So it goes on to say, should a person be interred in life is extinct. He can cause only men die on recovery to consciousness, ascend from the grave and the coffin by the ladder. It's not able to ascend, ring the bell, giving an alarm and then that's fine. And if they don't do that after unspecified period, you seal it all off.
[00:32:20] Here's my winner. So 1843 Christian Henry Eisenbrandt of Baltimore, which is apparently important filed a patent for a unique model of a quote life preserving coffin in doubtful cases of death. Which is already a bit weird. So it had a porthole for breathing and to allow the voice to be heard
[00:32:41] And there's a complex lever and spring mechanism, which quote was easy to operate even for a weakened man. So here's the ad. This is the ad that I've been drawing on a couple of times before the undersigned respectfully informs his friends, cause it's written by people who make this life preserving coffin. And the public, it informs his friend and the public that he has constructed a quote, life preserving coffin, which he flatters himself upon examination to give universal satisfaction. The superiority of this kind of coffin over the ordinary ones will be perceived at a glance.
[00:33:14] Rests upon the fact that the inventor has so contrived an arrangement admitting of pure air and with springs and levers on the inside, that the slightest emphasized motion of its inmate, which is a comforting term, will be instantly communicated to the springs, which freeing the coffin lid, it flies open.
[00:33:33] Now the fact that it could be covered in dirt, I assume they mean they leave you in state for a while. Okay. So a circumstance which entirely relieves the confinement of the body and thus removes all uneasiness and premature internment from the minds of anxious friends and relatives.
[00:33:46] Will: It's an escape room coffin. So it's spring loaded. There's a giant spring inside. So just a tiny little ping of your fingers or something. Coffin bursts open. That's so cool. Not dead yet. I want to be buried in one of them anyway.
[00:34:00] Rod: I'll see to it.
[00:34:00] Will: That's fucking cool though. Walking through a cemetery or I'm fucking in the cemetery and then making the upsprings coffin lid.
[00:34:09] Rod: And what I love most about this one page ad. There are testimonials from mDs.
[00:34:15] Will: I was once buried.
[00:34:17] Rod: Close, not quite enough for MD. So I'll just give you a couple. I believe it to be well deserving of public attention and adoption as calculated to be very valuable in cases of suspended animation. So that's Dr. John Dunbar. Dr. Perkins says, having examined the coffin made by I fully and cheerfully concur with the foregoing testimonials in recommending it to public attention and adoption. There are eight of these. Here's my fave. It's from Dr. J. C. S. Moncur. Having been requested by you to examine your invention of the life preserving coffin, I unhesitatingly say that it is one of the most beautiful apparatus of the kind which has e'er come to my observation.
[00:34:59] Of the kind, there were more than one. Admirably and completely adapted to the purpose of its construction. Believing from the present rapidity of burial, the universal custom of our country, of immediately thrusting from our deceased friends, has consigned many an unfortunate creature to the horror of grave resuscitation, which might have been prevented by an apparatus of your kind and waiting until evident signs of general putrefaction have appeared, and being convinced that resuscitation is not a very rare occurrence and we'll continue so under the present burial arrangement, it's a very long sentence, I feel highly gratified to find you have been so successful in your endeavors to prevent this occurrence and have not the least doubt that when the value of your invention becomes generally known, a discerning public will amply remunerate you for genius, mechanical skill and application. So he got eight very enthusiastic people. So it wasn't the inventor who did it. It was the people who made it, put this full on testimonial in a Baltimore newspaper about how good this thing is.
[00:35:58] Will: How many people were buried in these things?
[00:36:00] Rod: !That I could not find.
[00:36:02] Will: How many people were saved?
[00:36:04] Rod: Also, unknown. Give me some info
[00:36:06] Will: I'm not blaming you. I'm just saying everywhere prey on fears. It sounds like actually people probably bought this. And so there are people buried down there right now in these coffins. I'd love to know the number. I'd love to know if one ever, one ever did the job. I hope
[00:36:23] Rod: but the upside is, look, if you want to get a deal on your own safety box. Cause we've got the going, got a life preserving coffins dot and type in the code wholesome 20. You'll get 20 percent off.
[00:36:33] Will: What? No, you won't. No, you won't. See, but no, but here's the thing. These sorts of things available now?
[00:36:39] Rod: Look, I don't think so. Or only that'd be very niche.
[00:36:42] Will: We have become far more trusting in our doctor's abilities to say, No, you're alive or dead but stories make the news all the time. People waking up in the morgue, like there was one six months ago from somewhere in South America, they are far from zero. They are far from zero stories of people waking up in the morgue and, but we don't do this stuff anymore.
[00:37:01] Rod: What constitutes actual death in hospitals has been argued about and still continues to be argued about.
[00:37:07] Will: Don't worry about it.
[00:37:07] Rod: Meaning that'll do. You seem dead ish, dead enough.
[00:37:12] Will: I mean, for me, if you were to look at our culture from space, you'd go, man they care about, you know, avoiding death a whole fucking lot.
[00:37:20] Rod: Yeah, I agree. I agree that there's a strong argument for saying, stop worrying so much.
[00:37:24] Will: Would you get one of these?
[00:37:25] Rod: No, I'd rather be well and truly determined one way or another before getting to the boss.
[00:37:30] Will: So you're going to be cremated, which is basically the equivalent of having your head chopped off. Like that's the equivalent.
[00:37:35] Rod: When did I say that?
[00:37:36] Will: No, cremated is saying, make sure.
[00:37:39] Rod: I want to be really dead. No, I want to be what's it taxidermied. Wholesome taxidermy surfaces. Give us a call.
[00:37:50] Will: Well, it's nice to hear your deepest, darkest fears.
[00:37:53] Rod: Again.
[00:37:56] Will: Enjoy.
