Premature Burial and How It May Be PreventedTebb, William
Science
Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented
Tebb, William
Burial, Premature
[DR. ROGER S. CHEW’S CASES.]
“Mary Norah Best, aged seventeen years, an adopted daughter of Mrs.
C. A. Moore, _née_ Chew, ‘died’ of cholera, and was entombed in the
Chew’s vault in the old French cemetery, at Calcutta. The certifying
surgeon was a man who would have benefited by her death, and had twice
(though ineffectually) attempted to put an end to her adopted mother,
who fled from India to England after the second attempt on her life,
but, unfortunately, left the girl behind. When Mary ‘died’ she was
put into a _pine_ coffin, the lid of which was _nailed_, not screwed,
down. In 1881, ten years or so later, the vault was unsealed to admit
the body of Mrs. Moore’s brother, J. A. A. Chew. On entering the
vault, the undertaker’s assistant and I found the lid of Mary’s coffin
on the floor, while the position of the skeleton (half in, half out of
the coffin, and an ugly gash across the right parietal bone) _plainly_
showed that after being entombed Mary awoke from her trance, struggled
violently till she wrenched the lid off her coffin, when she either
fainted away with the strain of the effort in bursting open her
casket, and while falling forward over the edge of her coffin struck
her head against the masonry shelf, and died almost immediately;
or, worse still,--as surmised by some of her clothing which was
found hanging over the edge of the coffin, and the position of her
right hand, the fingers of which were bent and close to where her
throat would have been had the flesh not rotted away,--she recovered
consciousness, fought for life, forced her coffin open, and, sitting
up in the pitchy darkness of the vault, went mad with fright, tore her
clothes off, tried to throttle herself, and banged her head against
the masonry shelf until she fell forward senseless and dead.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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