Premature burial and how it may be prevented : with special reference to trance, catalepsy, and other forms of suspended animation / by William Tebb and Edward Perry Vollum.

  • Tebb, William, 1830-1918.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Premature burial and how it may be prevented : with special reference to trance, catalepsy, and other forms of suspended animation / by William Tebb and Edward Perry Vollum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    functions reaches an extreme degree, the patient appears dead to casual and sometimes to careful observation. This condition has been termed ' death-trance,' and has furnished the theme for many sensational stories, but the most ghastly incidents of fiction have been paralleled by well-authenticated facts. [The last clause appears in the new edition as follows:—Persons have certainly been buried in this state, and during the recent epidemic of influenza an Italian narrowly es- caped interment during the consequent trance.] The duration of trance has varied from a few hours or days to several weeks, months, or even a year. Occasionally it is attended by some vaso - motor disturbance. In a well-authenticated case of death- trance the intense mental excitement produced by the preparations for fastening the coffin lid occasioned a sweat to break out over the body. Many notable men have at one time or another been subject to this disorder. Speaking of Benjamin Disraeli, Mr. J. Fitzgerald Molloy, in his Life of the Gorgeous Lady Blessington,vol.ii., pp. 37,38,says that in his youth he was seized with fits of giddiness, during which the world swung round him, he became abstracted, and once fell into a trance from which he did not recover for a week. LETHARGIC STUPOR, OR TRANCE. The Lancet of December 22, 1883, pp. 1078-80, contains particulars from the pen of W. T. Gairdner, M.D., LL.D., etc.. Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow, of a remarkable case of trance, extending continuously over more than twenty-three weeks, which attracted a considerable amount of notorietv at the time