In order to prevent unnecessary pain to the reader on a subject so distressing in its nature, the more sensational and horrifying cases of premature burial have been omitted. They can, however, be found in abundance in the writings of Bruhier, Köppen, Kempner, Lénormand, Bouchut, Russell Fletcher, and the Boston (U.S.) edition of Hartmann. In England and in America it is the fashion amongst medical men to maintain that the tests known to medical art are fully equal to the prevention of live burial, that the cases quoted by the newspapers are introduced for sensational purposes, and that most of them are apocryphal. The perusal of the cases recorded in this volume, and a careful consideration of the weight of cumulative evidence represented by the very full bibliography, must satisfy the majority of reflective readers that the facts are both authentic and numerous. PREMATURE BURIAL, AND HOW IT MAY BE PREVENTED. _SOME FORMS OF SUSPENDED ANIMATION._ CHAPTER I. TRANCE. OF all the various forms of suspended animation and apparent death, trance and catalepsy are the least understood, and most likely to lead the subject of them to a premature burial; the laws which control them have perplexed pathologists in all ages, and appear to be as insoluble as those which govern life itself. Dr. Le Clerc, in his “History of Medicine,” records that “Heraclides, of Pontus, wrote a book _concerning the causes of diseases_, and another _concerning the disease in which the patient is without respiration_, in which he affirmed that in this disorder the patient sometimes continued thirty days without respiration, in such wise that he appeared dead, notwithstanding that there was no corruption of the body.”[2] Dr. Herbert Mayo, in “Letters on Truths Contained in Popular Superstitions,” p. 34, says that “death-trance is the suspension of the action of the heart, and of breathing, and of voluntary motion--generally little sense of feeling and intelligence. With these phenomena is joined loss of external warmth, so that the usual evidence of life is gone. But there has occurred every shade of this condition that can be imagined, between occasional slight manifestations of suspension of one or other of the vital actions and their entire disparition.” Macnish, who also asserts that the function of the heart must go on, and even of the respiration, however slightly, says--“No affection to which the animal frame is subject is more remarkable than this (catalepsy, or trance).... There is such an apparent extinction of every faculty essential to life, that it is inconceivable how existence should go on during the continuance of the fit.”--_Philos. of Sleep, Glasgow, 1834, pp. 225-6._