Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/413

 Brothers of Charity, speaks in his memoirs of the frequency of premature burials in Italy. "Ah, merciful God!" he exclaims piously, "how many living men and women are annually taken to their graves in this Christian country!" Camillo was of opinion that the victims might be numbered by many scores—nay, by hundreds—in the course of a single year.

One day, after visiting the beds of the sick in a certain hospital in Lombardy, of which the name has been left in blank, Camillo entered the morgue, and found strewed upon the floor a great number of corpses, one of which was bleeding profusely from the head. "A dead man can not bleed in this way," thought Camillo, and had the body taken to another room, and there examined. The man was alive, and but for an accident would have received burial. He had been thrown to the ground with some violence a short time previously, and, then and there receiving the wound above alluded to, recovered consciousness. But he only survived his sentence of death three days; he died of the blow which had awakened him from his trance.

But there are double deaths—twofold burials—which are perhaps the most horrible of all. Society thinks it is burying one person, but the "deceased," being a woman, may from the point of view of maternity include two lives, or even more. Gasparo Rejes tells the story of a child born in the tomb whose mother was buried alive. The lady was the wife of a man of property named Francesco Orvallos, and "died," while far advanced in pregnancy, during her husband's absence. Orvallos, returning home the day after the funeral, had the tomb opened, not because he suspected foul play, but because he wished to gaze once more on the face of his beloved. The lady was in truth dead, but death had transpired in the grave. A child, struggling into existence, met the gaze of the bereaved husband, and was removed without difficulty by a medical assistant. The mother was once more consigned to the dust, but the child lived to be a man, and, carrying till his death the name of "Fruit of the Earth," occupied for several years the post of lieutenant-general on the frontiers of Cherez. This story is reproduced by the late Professor Comi in his treatise on "Apneology." Those who doubt it have only to read the following account of what is called "Involuntary Homicide," which happened in the south of Italy (at Castel del Giudice) in November last, and of which accounts were published at the time in the Neapolitan and English papers:

A poor woman at Castel del Giudice, in the province of Molise, was taken ill with the premonitory symptoms of childbirth, and, having fainted away while the doctor was being sent for, was, on his arrival, declared dead. Burial follows death very rapidly in southern countries, especially in Italy: it is the night of the tomb setting in without the twilight of the death-chamber; and eight-and-forty hours in the north of Italy, and four-and-twenty in the south, is the time allowed