Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/412

 of temperature caused him to start up in his bed. He complained of the draught and reprimanded his attendants. They had allowed a current of cold air to fall on his couch! Perhaps if the door had been kept shut, the poet, showing no signs of animation, would have been buried that day. Petrarch would have been defrauded of a large portion of his life, and the world would have lost, in consequence, some of its finest sonnets.

Misson, in his "Medical Anecdotes," tells a story of a lady who, in 1577, was buried alive in Cologne. This lady was the wife of a consul, and was placed in the family vault in gay attire, with rings on her fingers and a golden chain round her neck, as on her wedding-day. Robbers repaired to her grave at dead of night to steal her jewelry, and were taking the rings from her fingers, which were damp and swollen, when the lady awoke, and, sitting bolt upright, as if galvanized, stared and smiled at her visitors. One of the three men fell down in a fit, fearing the devil or his agency, and the others took to their heels "as if pursued by fiends." The lady walked home, and was received by her husband, first with fear, and afterward with transports of joy, and lived for many a long day in health and happiness. In the Church of the Holy Apostles at Cologne is a picture of the Consul's wife waking from the tomb, but the event is ascribed to a miracle, and death, and not a trance, is the subject of the picture.

But the resuscitated victims of apparent death do not always return safe and sound—hale in body and in mind—from the land of shadows. A carbineer in the Pope's service, named Luigi Vittori, was, not long ago, conveyed to the Roman hospital, and there, after a few days' acute suffering, registered as dead, his disease being "asthma." A doctor, glancing at the body, fancied he detected signs of life in it. A lighted taper was applied to the nose of the carbineer—a mirror was applied to his mouth; but all without success. The body was pinched and beaten, the taper was again applied, and so often and so obstinately that the nose was burned, and the patient, quivering in all his frame, drew short, spasmodic breaths—sure proofs, even to a non-professional witness, that the soldier was not altogether dead. The doctor applied other remedies, and in a short time the corpse was declared to be a living man. Luigi Vittori left the hospital to resume his duties as carbineer, but his nose—a scarred and crimson beacon on his face—told till he died (which was soon afterward) the sad story of his cure in the very jaws of the grave.

Stories are told of men who, after sentence of death at the hands of the doctors, returned to life blighted in intellect. Some of these victims of medical incapacity were men of position in society, but others—the great majority—were poor and friendless. Hospital cases have principally to do with the poor, and, in hospitals in warm countries, patients who show signs of approaching dissolution are quickly disposed of. Camillo de Lellis, the founder of an order of hospital monks, or