Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear

A fascinating account of the spread of hysterical fears of being buried alive at multiple times and places in human history, with a common origin in both fact and legend. What I found most interesting was the clash between the purveyors of irrational fears and the attempted refutations by incredibly poor skeptical critics (e.g., proponent Bruhier was more scientific than critic Louis), but the movement died out seemingly of its own accord. Bondeson does an excellent job of bringing together the relevant data from history, legend, medicine, art, and literature, into an entertaining and informative book, in some ways similar to Mary Roach's Stiff but without quite that level of irreverence.

The causes, history, and results of the fear of premature burial are detailed in _Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear_ (W. W. Norton & Co.) by Jan Bondeson. There may have been just a touch of truth in the old fear, but Bondeson's fascinating, cheerful, but ghoulish book shows that like most worries, the one about being buried alive was generally not worth getting upset about. This book is full of legends: the woman who awoke when a grave robber tried to cut her finger off to get her ring, the anatomist scared to death when he is about to do an exam of a body that wakes at the touch of the knife, the exhumed skeleton that is found to have clawed at the inside of its coffin and vainly burst the lid, and so on. These legends have been revived now and then in the current tabloids, but they blossomed in seventeenth century Europe. Physicians at the time were aware that in the plague or cholera epidemics, the mayhem might mean that victims of the carnage might not be individually diagnosed, and death might only be apparent. When a medical book on premature burial became stocked with legends and addressed to the public, a trend to worry about premature burial began. The Germans even introduced the practice of communities proudly building houses for the dead. Bodies would, by law, come to the institutions, stick around until putrefaction was documented, and then be released for burial. The facilities permitted families to visit, and even charged for sightseers, although the smell was awful. The houses, even with the support of law, got few takers, and it was never documented that even one occupant woke up. Security coffins were designed for those who were buried in the usual way, so that people could receive light and air if they happened to wake up underground, and could even get food and drink by a special tube once they sounded the alert. The alert, a tolling bell or a raised flag, would go off if the entombed tripped a special lever or pulled a rope, but many of the gadgets had the problem of false alarms. As the body decomposed it might swell or shift, triggering the alarm. Americans responded to the increased fear of premature burial by patenting a coffin that had rotating lights as an alarm, and even had a light, heater, and telephone within.

It seems that there was a spell of cataleptic-type episodes which (like the syndrome of fainting after emotional shocks) for a while was a way people showed emotional distress physically; it may be that they were at some risk for being thought dead prematurely, and Bondeson shows that the fear of being buried alive was not completely without foundation. There are cases of people, even recently, medically certified as dead, who lived on; at special risk are those who have been chilled to a low temperature or who have taken overdoses of different medicines. The centuries of fear of burying people alive, however, simply faded, undoubtedly because of increasing trust in medical evaluations. There were organizations devoted to the prevention of the horrors of being buried alive, but these were often allied with other cranky groups like the spiritualists, and they wilted after 1900. True to its subtitle, this entertaining book is a "terrifying history," but it is a history of terrifying previous generations, mostly unnecessarily. Premature burial did have some slight influence on medical practice, and considerable influence in literature (especially Poe), but its chief effect has been to act as yet another bogeyman. We have outgrown this bogey, which makes Bondeson's book all that much more fun to read.

After reading a gut-wrenchingly funny review of this book... I had to have it. I'm glad I went with my instincts. Buried Alive chronicles sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes exploitative response to 18th and 19th century fears of waking to find yourself trapped in a coffin buried beneath the ground. Occasional incidents of such mistaken burials became intermingled with folk tales, misrepresentations, and outright fiction to frighten rich and poor alike, leading to some truly bizarre methods of ascertaining once and for all whether a candidate for burial was truly dead. Methods ranged from installing slowly putrefying bodies in "waiting mortuaries," to subjecting suspected corpses to such unnatural treatments as tobacco enemas and a mouthful of warm urine. And those were the milder procedures. Bondeson has done plenty of research, and presents it in a clear, logical manner. While chuckling at times over the excesses of it all, he doesn't slip into easy sarcasm or cheap shots. His knowledge of the cultural and social environment of the times helps him bring a sense of sympathy to telling the tales of those who really were trying to do the right thing.

This book presents a fairly gruesome subject in a manner that makes it difficult to put the book down. This history of one of humanity's greatest fears makes for a very informative and interesting ("lively"?) read.

While it's title suggests a melodramatic and lurid tale, Jan Bondeson's book Buried Alive is actually an historic account of a growing preoccupation with anti-mortem burial that started during the 1700's in Europe and did not decline until the early 20th Century. While many of the stories that the author recounts from the pamphlets, periodicals, and book length works of that time period were indeed colorful, they were also for the most part just as much works of fiction as the stories on the same topic by the famed 19th Century novelist and poet Edgar Allen Poe. It seems entirely likely that Poe's work itself may have been influenced by the sensational journalism of the time.

Bondeson notes that there are strong components of sadism, necrophilia, and fantasy about most of the stories of premature burial and an almost folktale continuity among some of the stories from one country to another. As he points out, when reliable authorities undertook to investigate the underlying story of a premature burial as reported in some of these accounts, they almost unanimously discovered that the stories were pure fabrications used to sell newspapers or to encourage the public to buy specially designed coffins, build special hospitals for the dead, or simply purchase an author's book or support his cause.

When Bondeson analyzes the descriptions of the supposed victims of anti-mortem burial, he makes it clear that totally normal causes for their disarray can be proposed, but that the data supporting more rational interpretations were either unavailable at the time or were ignored for the sake of a good story. It's not that he feels that this type of disaster is impossible or that all stories of misdiagnosis are confabulations. Quite the contrary. In assessing the accounts, he points to several that he believes might have been real. He also defends the fears at the time as not totally unrealistic and is unwilling to label individuals who took precautions against such an occurance as "phobic."

Interesting too is the inverse correlation that he points out between the rise in the fear of awaking in a coffin and a general decline in confidence in the medical establishment of any given period. He notes a similar modern day fear being declared dead prematurely that occurred during the 1980s and 90s when medical practitioners were uncertain about the exact criteria for declaring an individual dead, as transplant became a viable form of treatment and viable organs scarce, and as prolonged life support became more successful. At just what point such support becomes a prolongation of the dying process is still a burning issue in many countries, as the book How We Die makes very apparent.

Since I work in a teaching hospital on a surgical intensive care unit and have been confronted with a number of the ethical issues associated with death and dying and with the concerns of family and friends over the well being of family members at this stage of life, I found the book of considerable interest. The historic effect of the media on public opinion and its not always altruistic agenda were also of interest.

The book is probably not as entertaining as one would expect from the title, but it is very interesting and informative as history. It's certainly a very carefully researched and lucid account. For those who are more interested in the process of death and dying and the current ethical issues associated with it, I would suggest the previously mentioned book, How We Die. For those interested in classic spooky tales on the subject, I'd suggest a collection of the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe.