Customer Reviews

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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 <EM>Stiff</EM> but without quite that level of irreverence.

This book gives the reader a very good idea of the frenzy and fear our forefathers faced when death came to call.Being buried alive did happen on occasion and there were many close calls.Bondeson,an M.D. gives the topic a good going over and his research is full of stories,urban myths and legends mostly German and French who,it appears, were the most concerned and paranoid of being declared dead,usually by an untrained physician,casketed and buried before their last breath was taken.Coffin design,complete with bells,whistles,spring loaded pennants and flags,air tubes,and enough food for a week must have made many local cemeteries look more like a miniature golf course than what they were meant for,a final resting place for the dead.The medical establishment agreed that the only sure way to state you were dead was to allow what is known as putrification to begin.Once you began to look like a rotting Halloween pumpkin and smelled like, well, a really dead body, your family felt that it was time to dig the grave and drop you in.Waiting houses,what amounted to the frontrunners of todays modern day morgues were designed and were big business.Todays definition of death and the guidelines for establishing what death of the body is should put people at ease.Back then you might have had a red hot poker or a tobacco smoke enema put up your anus, have your feet slashed open,urine or something worse put in your mouth to name a few of the horrific techniques employed at the time.It makes one look at a stethoscope in a different light.Literary and cinematic treatments of this medical conundrum are discussed as well.For those who have ever wondered about or needed information about premature burial this book is a good place to start.It could have used more pictures which would have been welcome and at times I felt I was reading the same material over and over again hence only 3 stars.If funerial history is for you then you should dig in and bury yourself in its pages.If you should fall asleep while reading and wake up in a coffin don't worry too much,they've checked, your dead.

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.

I purchased this book to continue researching Victorian death practices after reading a friend's copy so I could make notations. I found the book just as informative and had a few giggles over some of the tests used to determine if a body were indeed dead. It indeed raised the question of 'why aren't more cemeteries haunted?'. I would definitely recommend this book for a read by anyone wondering about the fear of death.

Wow! What an intriguing read. This topic has fascinated me since childhood. This book is well-researched. So well in fact that the details of some accounts are belabored painstakingly. That would be my only complaint, i.e. at times I was begging for the punchline to the account and got lost in the details.

Overall, well-done and very meticulously put together. If you have an interest in medicine, the history of medicine or anthropology, this book will be facinating. However, it definitley takes some patience to get through due to the level of detail (commented on above).