Wirkliche und wahre mit Urkunden erläuterte Geschichten und Begebenheiten von lebendig begrabenen Personen, welche wiederum aus Sarg und Grab erstanden sind. Zur Warnung geschrieben von H. v. E. Frankfurt & Leipzig: s.n., 1798.
8vo (184 x 105 mm). Collation: A-F8 [blanks F7-8 bound in and unopened]. 88, [4] pages. Title in red and black. Printed on rough paper, untrimmed, deckle edges. (Marginal tear in fol. A3, small paper flaw in B2, some light foxing.) Late 19th-century calf-backed boards, preserving earlier marbled wrappers (lower corners defective).***
Only Edition of a collection of 25 chilling accounts of people mistakenly judged dead and buried while still alive. The subject had been in the air since the mid-18th century, as medical practitioners had begun to realize that the apparent cessation of breathing, deathly pallor, or cold skin were not infallible signs of death. Fears of contagious illness often led to rapid burials, and cases of mistaken interments of the merely comatose were not unheard of. “Before the era of modern medicine, the fear [of being buried alive] was not entirely irrational” (Wikipedia article on taphophobia). Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying stories scarcely exaggerated the horrors of live burials.
To combat the risk of premature burials, in the 1790s some local authorities in Germany began to establish “waiting mortuaries” (Totenhaüser or Leichenhaüser), facilities to safely house those presumed dead until the manifestation of definite signs of death, i.e., putrefaction, which usually set in after about 3 days. (Paradoxically, the chemical effects of that process, causing movements, signs, or swelling of bodies, were of course often mistaken for signs of life.) The author of this text praises these establishments in his introduction, thanking the enlightened princes who have set them up for the good of their subjects. He explains that his goal in presenting these case studies is to convince the public to handle properly those who have just (apparently) died, and he provides counsels on correct procedure (don’t remove those supposedly dead from their beds right away, keep them in a warm place with “reliable, calm” persons who can check on them, don’t remove their pillows).
However, the accounts themselves are true horror stories, and the author lavishes vivid prose on the victims’ sufferings. Some died entombed and were discovered later, such as the apparently lifeless monk who was locked in a crypt where the monastery’s dead were kept until their burials, and whose message scratched in glass was discovered only centuries later. Others survived thanks to luck, whether discovered by grave-robbers, rescued by their lovers, or awoken by trumpets or by the cold touch of the knife of a dissecting doctor. Most of the tales, whose sources are not stated, are apocryphal. The morbid fixation on suffering evinced by these accounts was typical of this “new literary genre”; some of the anecdotes in this collection were recounted in different forms in at least two other collections (see Bondeson). Two are stated to have been borrowed from Jean-Jacques Bruhier d'Ablaincourt, the influential French doctor whose 1742 Dissertation sur l'incertitude des signes de la mort (a translation of a thesis by the Dutch-born physician Jacob. B. Winslow) was one of the first published treatises on the subject.
Authorship of the text has at times been incorrectly attributed to the mystic and philosopher Karl von Eckarthausen; the attribution on the title to “H[err?] v. E.” was more plasuibly identified by Baader as “a certain H. von Eck.”
OCLC locates 2 North American copies (Harvard and National Library of Medicine). VD18 12176737; Baader, Das gelehrte Baiern (1804), I, col. 276. Cf. Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive, the Terrifying History of our Most Primal Fear (2001), chapter 5. Item #4437
Price: $1,250.00