part of the cemetery there had been dug up and many graves disinterred. In La Presse Médicale, Paris, 17th August, 1904, there is an article, “The Danger of Apparent Death,” by Doctor Icard of Marseilles, whose study La Mort réelle et la Mort apparente when published in 1897 attracted great attention. The writer, an eminent figure in the medical world, describes in detail some twelve cases of the revival of persons who had been certified as dead by their doctors, the body in one instance recovering consciousness when several physicians were present and the funeral ceremonies had actually commenced. It should be remarked that Dr. M. K. Boussakis, Professor of Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine of Athens, was one of the eye-witnesses upon that occasion, and a similar case is mentioned on the authority of Dr. Zacutus Lusitanus, who was also present. It should be remembered that Greece is the country where belief in the vampire still most strongly survives.
A terrible case of actual interment whilst still alive is described in a letter published in the Sunday Times, 6th September, 1896. Some years ago the Paris Figaro, in an article of some length considered the terrible possibilities of being buried alive, and within fifteen days the editor received over four hundred letters from different parts of France, and all these were from persons who had either themselves been buried alive, or been on the point of being so interred, or who had escaped a premature grave through some fortunate accident.
In September, 1895, a boy named Ernest Wicks was found lying on the grass in Regent’s Park, apparently dead, and after being laid out in the S. Marylebone mortuary was brought back to life by the keeper, Mr. Ellis. When the doctor arrived the lad was breathing freely though still insensible, and a little later he was removed to the Middlesex Hospital. Here the surgeon pronounced him to be “recovering from a fit.” At an inquest held at Wigan, 21st December, 1902, Mr. Brighouse, one of the County Coroners for Lancashire, remarked with great emphasis upon the extraordinary circumstances, for he informed the jury that the child upon whom they sat had “died” four times, and the mother had obtained no less than three medical certificates of death, any one of which would have been sufficient for the subject to have been buried. In 1905, a Mrs. Holden, aged twenty-eight, living at Hapton, near Accrington, “died,” and the doctor did not hesitate
