Not always it was easy to guess if a corpse were really dead
To determine if the deads were in fact dead was an amazing and inexact science before the coming of the modern medicine. But the fear was not totally irrational. Throughout history there have been numerous cases of buried people cheers accidentally and peculiar legend spoke of open coffins where was a corpse with one long beard, or Las Palmas of the hands raised upwards, or destroyed by the effort of to have tried to escape…
Some people were as much scared to wake up within a coffin who left instructions it express of which its heart had to be stabbed or their throat cut before being buried.
Thus the things, and fruit of that fear, or “taphophobia” (of Greek the taphos, that means “tomb” and that would be translated like “fear to the tombs”), they were different the used techniques to establish the definitive character of the presumed finados.
One says that Paracelso (1493-1541), alchemist and perhaps the greatest doctor of his time, secured the resuscitation of a corpse by means of bellows, a trick that probably was picked up of Arab medical writings.
During centuries XVII and XVIII they administered enemas to them of tobacco smoke or the nipples with pliers were tweaked to them.
Another system consisted of throwing vigorously of the language of the presumed corpse, arriving to use for it a machine-clamp that, during at least three hours, and of continuous way put under, it strong pulls.
Also in century XVIII, the Danish anatomist Jacob Winslow (1669-1760) devised a method based on tickling in the nose with a pen, whipping the skin with nettles or to nail needles under the nails of the feet. Everything was worth to guarantee not to be buried the alive one.
Although, supposedly, some victims were given back to the life during these tortures, the scientific community considered that the unique true signal of the death was the rotting.
Thus, she advised myself that all person who presumed itself dead had to be placed in a warm place in search of decomposition signs before her burial. They were the calls “morgues of delay”.
In century XIX, the technological development in this search to avoid a premature burial took shape in the “coffin of security”, an invention that would allow erroneously buried to communicate with the world over them. The majority of the models included an air tube and a device that allowed to warn the surface of the return to the life of the buried one, blowing a horn, or raising a flag. A model existed that included a mechanical brass hammer to strike the coffin cover.
Other designs included stairs, escape hatches and even tubes for the food transfer. Another one would allow that the individual buried prematurely sent a firecracker by the air tube of the coffin. Some also even got to be equipped with a shovel.
An urban legend says that the proverb “Saved by the bell” derives the fact that in some of these “coffins of security” a chain was put that was tied to a bell in the outside, that would alert that the person recently buried not yet would have passed away.
It leaves an answer