“Sir,--_Apropos_ of your article and the correspondence about being buried alive, in the _Spectator_ of September 28, the enclosed may interest you. It is an extract which I have copied to-day out of a letter to a neighbour of mine from his brother in Ireland, dated October 6, 1895:--‘About three weeks ago, our kitchen-maid asked leave to go away for two or three days to see her mother, who was dying. She came back again on a Friday or Saturday, saying her mother was dead and buried. On Wednesday she got a letter saying her mother had been dug up, and was alive and getting all right. So she went up to see her, and sure enough there she was “right enough,” as G---- says, having got out of her trance, and knowing nothing about being in her grave from Saturday till Tuesday. The only thing she missed was her _rings_; she could not make out where they had got to. Her daughter, it seems, told the doctor on her way back here that it struck her that her mother had never got stiff after death, and she could not help thinking it was very odd; and it made her very uncomfortable. He never said a word: and the kitchen-maid heard nothing until she got the letter saying her mother was back again and alive. Luckily, she did not “come to” until she had been taken out of her coffin. It was a “rum go” altogether. They say exactly the same thing happened to a sister of hers who is now alive and well.’--I am, Sir, etc., “PEVERIL TURNBULL.” CHAPTER VII. PROBABLE CASES OF PREMATURE BURIAL. THERE is a great and natural reluctance on the part of medical practitioners to admit that they have made mistakes in death-certification, particularly in any one of the various forms of death counterfeits, or suspended animation. It should be noted that amongst the lectures delivered on special occasions, such as the opening of the medical schools, the subjects of trance and the danger of premature burial are conspicuous for their absence; allusion to these subjects is of rare occurrence, nor does the study of this abstruse branch of medicine, so far as can be ascertained, form part of any medical curriculum. In the bibliography at the end of this volume, extensive as it is, I can hardly refer to a single instance. Dr. Franz Hartmann, whose work on “Buried Alive” has passed through two English and one German edition, informs me that the same reticence is observable in the medical schools of Germany. Many medical men do not believe in death-trance. They declare that they have never seen such a case, and in their judgment when a sick patient ceases to breathe, when volition is suspended, and the stethoscope reveals no signs of cardiac action, the death is real, and the case beyond recovery. The evidence disclosed in this volume is the result of inquiry in many countries. From the _Medical Times_, London, 1860, vol. i., p. 65.