Through a detailed and fascinating exploration of changing medical knowledge and practice, this book provides a timeline of humankind’s understanding of physiological death. Anchored in Early Modern Britain, it explains how evolving medical theories challenged the ambiguous definition of death, instigating anxieties over the newly realized potential for officials to mistake a person’s time of death. Fears of premature burials were materialized as newspapers across Europe printed hundreds of articles about people who had been misdiagnosed as dead and were then buried—or nearly buried—alive. These stories have been tallied within this text to present the first contemporary statistic of how frequently misdiagnosed death led to premature burial during the eighteenth century.
The public consciousness of premature burial manifested itself in many ways, including the necessity of having a wake before a funeral and the creation of safety coffins. This book also explores the folkloric phenomenon of the rising dead and the stories that inspired a number of authors including Coleridge, Byron and Stoker, who blended medical understanding with fiction to create vampire literature.

Nicole C. Salomone is a scholar untangling the centuries-long struggle for medical understanding of death and near-death experiences. In addition to her research, she is passionate about the digitization of historical documents and artifacts and using technology to make them accessible to a wider audience. She lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Nicole C. Salomone
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages:
Bibliographic Info: photos, glossary, appendix, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2022
pISBN: 978-1-4766-8274-7
eISBN: 978-1-4766-4619-0
Imprint: McFarland