In this connection we may remark that no profession is more overcrowded at the present time than that of medicine, particularly in the United Kingdom, the English Colonies, and the United States. Hundreds of young men graduate from medical colleges every year, vainly seeking openings for a practice; and some, for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, resort to expedients which the _Lancet_ denounces as undignified, unprofessional, and disgraceful.[18] Then, again, the number of nurses and of those qualifying for this honourable vocation is already in excess of the demand, and nursing institutions under the keen competition to which they are subjected, are reducing their charges. Now, the care and treatment of the supposed dead is an honourable vocation, offering a wide field for the instructed physician and the tender and sympathetic nurse, and if the appliances for resuscitation were always at hand, as they should be, in every hospital, town-hall, mortuary, police station, and in all large hotels and churches, many lives now subjected to the risks of premature burial would be saved. While in London there are two or more houses or retreats for the dying, there is no place for the apparently dead but a shunned and neglected coffin. The time is not far distant when the present mode of treating the dead and the apparently dead--a practice born of superstition and fear, by which many are consigned to premature graves--will be catalogued amongst the barbarisms of the nineteenth century. CHAPTER XVI. NUMBER OF CASES OF PREMATURE BURIAL. THOSE interested in the movement, if we are right in designating the widespread feeling of discontent by this name, are occasionally asked if the cases of premature burial are numerous, and what estimates, if any, have been made of them. We have no means of answering these queries. We do not even know the percentage of people who are subject to trance, catalepsy, shocks, stroke of lightning, syncope, exhausting lethargy, excessive opium-eating, or other diseases or conditions which produce the various death-counterfeits. Personal inquiries over a considerable portion of Europe, America, and the East prove that such cases are by no means of infrequent occurrence, and this is the deliberate conclusion of nearly all the authorities cited in this volume. Dr. Chambers wrote in 1787--“Every age and country affords instances of surprising recoveries, after lying long for dead. From the number of those preserved by lucky accidents, we may conclude a far greater number might have been preserved by timely pains and skill.”--_Cited in Mort Apparente et Mort Réelle, p. 17._