Physicians of the earlier ages knew that there were disorders which so locked up or destroyed the external senses that the patients labouring under them appeared to be dead. According to Mr. Le Clerc, in his “History of Medicine,” Diogenes Laertius informs us “that Empedocles was particularly admired for curing a woman supposed to be dead, though that philosopher frankly acknowledged that her disorder was only a suffocation of the matrix, and affirmed that the patient might live in that state (the absence of respiration) for thirty days.” Mr. Le Clerc, in the work already quoted, tells us that “Heraclides of Pontus wrote a book concerning the causes of diseases, in which he affirmed that a patient is without respiration in certain disorders for thirty days, and that they appeared dead in every respect, except corruption of the body.” To these authorities we may add that of Pliny, who, after mentioning the lamentable fate of Aviola and Lamia, affirms--“That such is the condition of humanity, and so uncertain the judgment men are capable of forming of things, that even death itself is not to be trusted to.” Colerus, in “Oeconom.” part vi., lib. xviii., cap. 113, observes, “That a person as yet not really dead may, for a long time, remain apparently in that state without discovering the least signs of life; and this has happened in the times of the Plague, when a great many persons interred have returned to life in their graves.” Authors also inform us that the like accident frequently befalls women seized with a suffocation of the matrix (hysteria). Forestus, in “Obs. Med.,” 1. xvii., obs. 9, informs us--“That drowned persons have returned to life after remaining forty-eight hours in the water; and sometimes women, buried during a paroxysm of the hysteric passion, have returned to life in their graves; for which reason it is forbidden in some countries to bury the dead sooner than seventy-two hours after death.” This precaution of delaying the interment of persons thought to be dead is of a very ancient date, since Dilberus, in “Disput. Philol.,” tome i., observes that Plato ordered the bodies of the dead to be kept till the third day, _in order to be satisfied of the reality of death_.