Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear

""The huge modern textbooks on forensic medicine... choose to ignore the fact that less than 150 years ago many medical practitioners freely admitted to being uncertain whether their patients were dead or alive."" As the author (whose excellent The London Monster was published in December; see Forecasts, Nov. 20, 2000) shows in this engrossing yet disappointing book, the fear of accidentally being buried alive reverberated throughout 18th- and 19th-century Europe and the United States, and even continued into the 20th century. Hundreds of stories about people being discovered buried alive circulated in medical journals, literature (from the medieval Decameron to Edgar Allan Poe) and popular lore. This fear spurred doctors to debate when life ends, and motivated Germany to create mortuaries in the 1800s in which corpses rotted for days before they could be interred. In 1822, another German invented a ""security coffin,"" in which a person buried prematurely could breathe through a tube by triggering a mechanism. The subject is fascinating, and Bondeson, a medical doctor, is thorough in discussing the alleged cases. The ""shameful past of medical science with regard to the certainty of the signs of death"" was, indeed, a real problem. Yet he readily acknowledges that the numbers of those buried alive were ""exaggerated."" If that is true, as by his own account it appears to be, then a book that studied the fear itself and what factors affected this deep-rooted dread might have been more fruitful. The few pages where Bondeson does this--where, for instance, he discusses the impact of the coffin's development in the 17th and 18th centuries--are where his subject truly comes, well, alive. 30 illus.. (Mar.) Forecast: It worked for Poe and it'll work for Bondeson. This book, cleverly rich with illustrations, will not only sell well in hardcover but could prove a hit down the road in trade paperback.