Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/295

Rh Donnet, in the Senate, told his own story of the circumstances under which he narrowly escaped being buried alive.

Besides these instances of premature burial in which the victim escaped the fearful consequences of the mistake made, others may be cited in which the blunder was discovered only too late. Quite a number of such cases are known, some of which are told with details too romantic to entitle them to implicit belief, while, however, many of them show unquestionable signs of authenticity. There long prevailed a tradition, not easily traceable to any source, which attributed the death of the Abbé Prévost to a mistake of this kind. All his biographers relate that the famous author of "Manon Lescaut," falling senseless from the effect of a rush of blood, in the heart of the forest of Chantilly, was supposed to be dead; that then the surgeon of the village having made an incision into his stomach, by direction of the magistrate, to ascertain the cause of death, Prévost uttered a cry, and did then die in earnest. But it has since been proved that the story is imaginary, and that it was made up after Prévost's death; nor do any of the necrological accounts published at the time refer it to the consequences of a premature autopsy. Though the account of Prévost dissected alive seems doubtful, that is not the case with the story told with regard to an operation by the famous accoucheur, Philip Small. A woman, about to be confined, fell into a state of seeming death. Small relates that when he was summoned to perform the Cesarean operation, the by-standers, convinced that the woman was dead, urged him to proceed with it. "I supposed so, too," he says, "for I felt no pulse in the region of the heart, and a glass held over her face showed no sign of respiration." Then he plunged his knife into the body, and was cutting among the bleeding tissues, when the subject awoke from her lethargy.

We cite some still more startling instances. Thirty years ago, a resident of the village of Eymes, in Dordogne, had been suffering for a long time from a chronic disorder of little consequence in itself, but marked by the distressing symptom of constant wakefulness, which forbade the patient any kind of rest. Worn out with this condition, he consulted a doctor, who prescribed opium, advising great caution in its use. The invalid, possessed with that common-enough notion that the efficacy of a drug is proportioned to its quantity, took at one time a dose sufficient for several days. He soon fell into a deep sleep, which continued unbroken for more than twenty-four hours. The village doctor, being summoned, finds the body without warmth, the pulse extinct, and, on opening the veins of both arms in succession, obtains but a few drops of thick blood. The day after, they prepared for his burial. But, a few days later, closer inquiry revealed the imprudence the poor wretch had committed in taking an excessive quantity of the prescribed narcotic. The report spreading among the villagers, they insist on his disinterment, which is allowed. Gathering in a crowd, at