Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear [Paperback]

Jan Bondeson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2002

"A necrobibliac classic: it may keep you up all night—not from fear but from fascination."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review 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 1800s 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 horrific, contorted positions inside their coffins, that ten out of every one hundred people were buried before they were dead. With over fifty illustrations, Buried Alive explores the medicine, folklore, history, and literature of Europe and the United States to uncover why such fears arose and whether they were warranted. "A weird and wonderful little tome."—Salon.com "Bondeson weaves a strange disturbing, and weirdly enthralling tale. Cremation never sounded so good."—Lingua Franca "A most useful and entertaining book....Deserves a place on every bedside table in America."—Patrick McGrath, author of Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution  More than 50 illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What could be worse than waking up in a dark, confined space and realizing that you are in a sealed coffin? Jan Bondeson details the history--factual and fictional--of this primal fear in Buried Alive.

Premature burial has a long literary history, from Boccaccio's Decameron to Romeo and Juliet to Wilkie Collins's Jezebel's Daughter and, of course, Edgar Allan Poe's "Premature Burial" and other works. Macabre tales of narrow escapes owing to grave robbers and lazy gravediggers, as well as horrific stories of exhumed coffins containing bloodied, contorted corpses, were common in both the medical and the lay press in the 18th and 19th centuries. Bondeson shows how these stories reflected public fears--fears caused in part by the development of resuscitation techniques for drowning victims, which fed a growing doubt in the reliability of prevailing signs of death. The medical community was divided on the issue; some were offended that the general public doubted their ability to determine death. Others, however, searched for definitive signs of death, many of which seem ludicrous today (one suggestion involved sticking the finger of a suspected corpse in the doctor's ear; if life remained the doctor would hear a faint buzzing sound). Bondeson also describes, in gleeful detail, other systems developed to prevent premature burial, including elaborate security coffins with signaling devices inside. More remarkable are the "Leichenhäuser" or waiting mortuaries where corpses were kept in warm rooms until putrefaction was evident. Each corpse had a number of strings or wires attached to its fingers and toes, so that the slightest twitch would sound an alarm and medical aid could be brought immediately. These Leichenhäuser were built in many cities in German-speaking Europe; one built in Munich in 1808 featured both a common and a luxury section and was open to the public (Mark Twain visited in the 1880s); the Vienna Leichenhäus used an electronic warning system (though not in its separate section for suicides, it's interesting to note); and two were built in Stuttgart as late as 1875.

Were these precautions necessary? No "patient" ever actually revived while in any of the German waiting mortuaries, but Bondeson does describe some documented near-miss cases from the 20th century in which supposed corpses were revived. Throughout the book, Bondeson recounts old wives' tales, urban legends, and scientific study with equal levels of straightforwardness and humor--and, perhaps, a slight smirk. Though it's not for the squeamish (which is perhaps an unnecessary warning; what squeamish person is going to read a book about premature burial?), Buried Alive is an entertaining and eminently readable look at this little-known history. --Sunny Delaney --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

"The huge modern textbooks on forensic medicine... choose to ignore the fact that less than 150 years ago many medical practitioners freely admitted to being uncertain whether their patients were dead or alive." As the author (whose excellent The London Monster was published in December; see Forecasts, Nov. 20, 2000) shows in this engrossing yet disappointing book, the fear of accidentally being buried alive reverberated throughout 18th- and 19th-century Europe and the United States, and even continued into the 20th century. Hundreds of stories about people being discovered buried alive circulated in medical journals, literature (from the medieval Decameron to Edgar Allan Poe) and popular lore. This fear spurred doctors to debate when life ends, and motivated Germany to create mortuaries in the 1800s in which corpses rotted for days before they could be interred. In 1822, another German invented a "security coffin," in which a person buried prematurely could breathe through a tube by triggering a mechanism. The subject is fascinating, and Bondeson, a medical doctor, is thorough in discussing the alleged cases. The "shameful past of medical science with regard to the certainty of the signs of death" was, indeed, a real problem. Yet he readily acknowledges that the numbers of those buried alive were "exaggerated." If that is true, as by his own account it appears to be, then a book that studied the fear itself and what factors affected this deep-rooted dread might have been more fruitful. The few pages where Bondeson does this--where, for instance, he discusses the impact of the coffin's development in the 17th and 18th centuries--are where his subject truly comes, well, alive. 30 illus.. (Mar.)Forecast: It worked for Poe and it'll work for Bondeson. This book, cleverly rich with illustrations, will not only sell well in hardcover but could prove a hit down the road in trade paperback.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (March 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039332222X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393322224
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #993,089 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ghoulishly entertaining, May 3, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (Hardcover)

This is an interesting little book. Apparently in the very recent past, there existed fairly widespread fear of being buried prematurely. This was in part due to the fact that the pronouncement of death was not performed by a physician, but rather by a layperson, usually a family member. This fear led to the introduction of various schemes to try to prevent this horrific mistake. With some thoroughness, the author details these attempts to prevent a poor soul from awakening within a coffin. Some of these strategies included Hospitals for the Dead in Germany where corpses could be monitored for a period of time prior to burial, or safety coffins equipped with various escape devices, food, drink and books, or bells and whistles and sometimes, even telephones! There is much more described in this text and some of the ideas were downright macabre.

The tone of the book is somewhat light. Although quite scholarly in his research, the author presents the material in a very readable and often humorous way without resorting to too ghoulish or juvenile humor.

I have eclectic reading interests and picked this out as something different to read, and that it was. It is interesting and enjoyable reading. It is very thorough and at over three hundred pages I learned more about this odd and historic phobia than I really needed to know. However, if you are so motivated, you will be enlightened and entertained by the author's prose. If for some inexplicable reason you need to know something about this topic, I could not imagine a more comprehensive source.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Fascinating Exploration of the Fear of Premature Burial, June 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (Hardcover)

In the early part of the seventeenth century, Jacques-Benigne Winslow, a Danish anatomist who lived and taught in Paris, claimed that, "it is evident from Experience, that many apparently dead, have afterwards proved themselves alive by rising from their shrouds, their coffins, and even from their graves." Winslow suggested that the means for determining death were unreliable and, hence, there was a widespread risk of being buried alive. Winslow went on to write a detailed compendium of alleged cases of premature burial, mixing fact with folklore and creating a kind of Ur-text for what subsequently became both a widespread popular fear in Western Europe and an at-times respected (if sometimes eccentric) intellectual and social movement for measures to eliminate the risk of premature burial.

In "Buried Alive", Dr. Jan Bondeson, professor at the University of Wales College of Medicine, traces the history of the fear of premature burial in Western Europe and the United States, a fear that attained its clearest popular expression in the macabre literature of writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, but which had a much more significant, albeit less well known, intellectual history. Beginning with Winslow's treatise, which was written in Latin and known by few outside the Parisian medical profession, Bondeson carefully explores how Winslow's work was translated into French, and popularized, in the mid-eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Bruhier, another French physician. While Winslow's Latin treatise would have been confined to the dusty archives of history, Bruhier was a great popularizer and his translation and expansion of Winslow's book was widely read and translated in France and other countries of Western Europe. From this popularization, there developed a widespread popular fear of premature burial, as well as a legitimate medical debate about how to determine whether a person was dead or alive.

The popular fear and the professional debate went through many iterations. In Germany, Christopher Wilhelm Hufeland, a practicing physician, published an article in 1790 which outlined a plan to erect a house for the dead in his hometown of Weimar. The idea was based upon the general belief that the only reliable means of determining death was the onset of putrefaction. Popularizing an idea originally suggested in Bruhier's work, Hufeland's proposal was avidly endorsed within Germany and led to the construction of numerous waiting mortuaries or "Leichenhauser", where the dead were attached to alarm devices to detect movement and identify those who were not, in fact, dead and also to observe the onset of putrefaction. Indeed, Leichenhauser continued to exist into the twentieth century in Germany.

In England and the United States, both the popular and medical concern about premature burial arrived much later. Indeed, it was only in the nineteenth century that the English and Americans began to give any credence to the fear and to the medical issue and, even then, it largely became the short-lived domain of spiritualists and charlatans. It did result, however, in the development of a number of ingenious security vaults and other coffins and burial devices intended to allow the person buried alive to survive and signal those in the world of the living of their grim fate. Perhaps the most well known of these devices was the so-called "Bateson's Belfry", a coffin which allowed its still living inhabitant to ring a bell that stood above the grave, presumably permitting a post-interment rescue.

"Buried Alive" is a fascinating and methodical exploration of the fear and the intellectual and social history surrounding the idea of premature burial in Western Europe and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. However, unlike Bondeson's earlier work, "A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities", which never ceased to fascinate and entertain, "Buried Alive" is much more like an academic treatise, a book which certainly has suitable rewards for the reader, but which is written in prose that is dry as bone.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A carefully researched and lucid account, January 22, 2003

By 

Atheen M. Wilson "Atheen" (Mpls, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (Hardcover)

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.