The other day, sensational news spread around the world. In a small Portuguese town, a newborn baby, declared dead, lay in the morgue for almost a day and unexpectedly came to life before the cremation itself. The unfortunate man spent 21 hours at a temperature of minus 11 degrees Celsius. And when he was taken out of the freezer to be cremated, he roared loudly. Fearfully? Certainly. But it is even more terrible to realize that there are a great many documented cases when the deceased were not even dead at all.
ERROR RELEASED
Here's another example. On January 15, 2017, a 75-year-old man from Junlian County, China, shocked relatives by waking up in a coffin during his own funeral. According to his son, in recent days, dad strongly resembled a dead man: he slept almost all the time, was weak, did not breathe, he had cold hands and feet. And then the heart stopped altogether …
It took several days to prepare the funeral. The long ceremony had been going on for eight hours, when the deceased woke up, got up and asked: “What's going on? Are you preparing my funeral?"
On March 23, 2005, 43-year-old Frenchman Jean Curré passed out in the middle of the street when he was returning home from a bakery. Kind people took the poor fellow to the hospital, but, alas, it was too late, the doctors could only state the death of the unfortunate. However, the stubborn old man did not think to give up. Five hours later, exactly on the way to the morgue, he woke up and demanded water.
60-year-old farmer Nicholas Stavridos from Athens was pronounced dead by doctors and, since he had no relatives, was soon buried. The next day, random visitors to the cemetery heard cries for help from one of the crypts. The crypt was opened, and from there, swearing at what the light stands, the deceased got out …
In 2007, in the Spanish town of Toledo, a cemetery watchman was doing his usual daily round when one of the deceased suddenly came out to meet him and asked with a tangled tongue what day it was. The watchman, who had seen a lot in his lifetime, literally lost his speech. For a whole month he spoke to those around him in sign language. And only after long-term treatment, to the delight of family and friends, he again gained the ability to speak.
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THE EPIDEMIC OF FEAR
And this is now, in the 21st century. Can you imagine what happened three hundred years ago, when a special trend in literature called the "Gothic novel" was born? In these books what was not only - blood-curdling horrors, dead men rising from the grave, ghosts and ghosts wandering through cemeteries and deserted halls of ancient castles. The society was seized by a real panic. The fear of being buried alive was so strong that it spawned terror.
Even the Swedish inventor Emmanuel Nobel was afraid of being buried alive. And for his son Alfred, the inventor of dynamite and the founder of the Nobel Prize, this fear grew into a very real, severe mania. In his autobiography, he called himself "an unfortunate half-man" and frankly admitted that his most cherished dream is "not to be buried alive."
But if there is a disease, there will be a cure, and therefore the entire 19th and early 20th century was intensively invented in this direction. Even the chamberlain of Emperor Alexander III specially dealt with the question of imaginary death and proposed a mechanism that, if the deceased happened to wake up in a coffin, would make it possible to find out about it right there.
The royal chamberlain in this field was neither the first nor the last. The aforementioned Emmanuel Nobel had both prerequisites: fear of an imaginary death and an inventive gift. Naturally, he proposed a number of inventions in this direction, in particular, "a safe coffin with ventilation and alarm." Upon a sudden awakening, the imaginary deceased had in this case the opportunity to signal himself by pulling, for example, a string, giving a sound or light signal, etc.
Nobel's idea did not go unnoticed. In 1880, a certain Bosselmann from Hamburg proposed "rescue equipment for the imaginary dead." The inner part of the burial volume was connected with atmospheric air using a special tube, the lower end of which was fixed on the jaw of the deceased. Stretched cords were attached to the arms and legs associated with external alarms, such as a bell. As soon as the deceased moved, the alarm went off. Special watchmen were ordered to monitor this.
In 1887, a certain Karl Redl demonstrated a new, improved version of Nobel's invention: instead of a mechanical system, he proposed an electrical one. Sensitive contacts were added to the area of the deceased's heart. As soon as the poor man moved, they closed the electrical circuit, the bell rang, the fan automatically turned on, which caught the air, and the prisoner who woke up could breathe normally.
In 1895, another German author proposed to equip the interior with a special window through which relatives could periodically observe the deceased. In 1913, this project was enriched with such improvements as the electric light in the coffin and the periscope lowered there.
However, this page of technical creativity did not take its rightful place in the annals of science next to, say, the discovery of Popov-Marconi. There are several reasons. Firstly, due to the delicacy of the subject itself, secondly, due to the low availability of patent literature for the general public and, thirdly, due to the fact that this wave of invention turned out to be only a kind of obsessive hobby of the time, in contrast to the same radio.
The last "squeak of progress" was the telephone set in the coffin.
Imagine, there is a telephone in the apartment connected to only one subscriber - the one in the cemetery. And the household, passing by, every time with fear look sideways at him.
IN SEARCH OF A RELIABLE WAY
Of course, the most "best mechanism" would be the correct statement of death, but none of the signs of death is sufficient and final. How to determine the onset of death? For lack of breath? That is so, but sick and emaciated people reduce the consumption of oxygen and the release of carbon dioxide to such a minimum that they may well pass for the dead.
Pulse stopping? It's the same here. The heart hardly beats, the pulse cannot be felt. Well, how not to be mistaken here.
Low body temperature? But what is considered a normal, average temperature? In a healthy person, the temperature changes all the time. It is completely different for the elderly, women and children. Different deaths, so to speak, leave behind different temperatures. If a person dies from a lightning strike, his body temperature remains unchanged for several hours, that is, it does not drop. And if death came from cholera, smallpox or tetanus, then the body temperature of the deceased even rises.
Pupil reaction to light? But the muscles of the pupil can contract even a few hours after death.
So there is only one thing left: to withstand the deceased for the prescribed period without burial. In the old days in Russia, the day of burial depended on the title, property status of the deceased, and, of course, on the season. As the famous ethnographer Zabylin writes, "in the summer the Russians buried them very soon, within 24 hours." If the burial was delayed, the body was lowered into the cellar. In winter, ordinary people buried their dead on the eighth day, before that the body was in the church. The royal persons were buried only on the fortieth day after the day when they deigned to repose.
But today old traditions have been lost and there are no legislative acts on the timing of the funeral. People are sent to the morgue while still lukewarm, immediately after death is declared. So we can only hope for the best.
Yulia AGAFONOVA