to give a certificate of death, when all the arrangements for the funeral were made. Fortunately, the undertaker noticed a slight twitch of the eyelids, and eventually the woman’s life was saved, and she lived well and strong under perfectly normal conditions. On 7th January, 1907, the Midland Daily Telegraph reported the case of a child who “to all intents and purposes died” whilst an operation was being performed upon it. However, the patient who had been certified dead more than half-an-hour before recovered. On 14th September, 1908, the papers published the details of an extraordinary trance of a Mrs. Rees, Nora Street, Cardiff, who appeared to have had a very narrow escape from premature burial. To go back some forty years, there may be found fully reported in the British Medical Journal, 31st October, 1885, the famous case of a child at Stamford Hill who fell into convulsions and passing into a trance was supposed to have died, recovering consciousness only after five days. Hufeland, dealing with these instances of trance, remarks that “Six or seven days are often required to restore such cases. Dr. Charles Londe[76] says that fits of this kind “last for days and days together,” and that “it seems not improbable that people may have been buried in this state in mistake for death.” A case of exceptional interest is described as occurring in 1883 by the Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow, Dr. W. T. Gairdner.[77] The person whom he was treating remained in a trance which lasted twenty-three consecutive weeks, and so remarkable a circumstance attracted very considerable attention at the time, giving rise to a lengthy controversy.
It should be more widely known that the ordinary simulacra of death are utterly deceptive and Dr. John Oswald remarks in his profound work Suspended Animal Life,[78] “in consequence of an ignorant confidence placed in them [the signs of death] persons who might have been restored to life … have been consigned to the grave.” In September, 1903, Dr. Forbes Winslow emphasized the fact that “all the appearances of death may be so strikingly displayed in a person in a cataleptic condition that it is quite possible for burial to take place while life is not extinct,” and he added “I do not consider that the ordinary tests employed to ascertain that life is extinct are sufficient; I maintain that the only satisfactory proof of death is decomposition.”
