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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Makes you think twice about donating your organs, April 2, 2000
By A Customer
This non-fiction book is disturbing and fascinating. After all, nobody knows what happens when you "die". Are you really dead, or are you just unable to move your muscles to alert others that you are alive? Davies recounts countless historical incidents in which people have mistakenly been diagnosed as dead, when in fact those poor unfortunates were in a cataleptic state. As a result, these victims suffer everything from being buried alive and waking up trapped in their coffins, being concious through their own autopsies (OUCH), or being cremated while alive. It's particularly sad to read the story of one woman's tomb which was opened up to reveal that she had indeed gotten out of her coffin but was unable to get out of the tomb. They found the body lying on the staircase, with the fingers missing from her hand. Apparently, she had started self-cannibalizing. Another horrific story recounts a doctor studying the freshly guillotined head of a criminal named Henry Languille in 1905 (guillotines apparently continued in France until 1981), which had fallen "upright on the sawdust, which...reduced the amount of blood lost from the wound." The doctor tells how he called out the criminal's name, and the eyes open and looked at the doctor! "I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me." The eyes then closed, and the doctor called out again. Once again, the eyes opened and looked at the doctor --"with perhaps even more penetration than the first time." Finally, they closed for good. The only way to make sure somebody is really dead, according to Davies, is to have it embalmed (which replaces all of the blood with a preservative), or to let the body rot. My main criticism of the book is the utter lack of footnotes and the sloppy bibiliography, which makes me doubt the veracity of some of the stories. For example, he states a quote which he claims is from an eighteenth century actor Benjamin Webster, who "related the frighting incident to John Coleman, who included it in his autobiographical 'Fifty Years of Active Life'..." But when you look in the bibliography, neither John Coleman nor Benjamin Webster are listed! Unless Davies is trying to pull our leg, he does a disservice to himself by the lack of annotations, since other information in the book seems to be accurate. Finally, it makes me think about all of those Hollywood movies in which the "undead" are portrayed as evil zombies. In light of the historical incidents which Davies relates, it's actually tragic that people have been buried alive, and deserve more compassion than ignorant superstition and fear. So the next time you are in a cemetery and you hear muffled crying for help, or see a hand coming out of the ground, get help or help them out. After all, the same thing could happen to you.
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