Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 May 1877 — A Singular Case. [ARTICLE]

A Singular Case.

Thu following extraordinary story comes to us from Cambridge, England; A railway porter, about thirty years of age, was recently seized with acute bronchitis, and was supposed to have expired in the throes of that dreadful ailment, which slays every year its thousands of little children and of aged people, simply because extreme youth is equally with extreme age too feeble to clear the bronchial tubes by a vigorous and sustained effort of coughing. The railway porter sup. posed to have departed this life was duly laid out and placed in a coffin. As his assumed dissolution had been sudden, the Coroher was consulted on the propriety of holding an inquest. Some uncertainty in this regard appears to have reigned in the mind of the medical man who had been called in; but, at any rate, the rail, way porter lay in his coflin two days, at the expiration of which he quietly got out of it, and, to the inexpressible amazement and alarm of those present in the chamber of death, sat himself down in a chair. It is stated that, in order to alleviate the severity of the spasms of bronchitis, the patient's mother had administered to him a sleeping draught, which had produced a deep and lengthy stupor, but the effects of which had stopped short just on this side of the grave. Commenting on this curious case, the London TeteyrapA remarks that there an advantages in keeping a corpse above ground for four or five days, or even for a whole week, after death. Among all the Latin races, interment within four and twenty hours is the invariable and rigorously-enforced rule of police; and had this poor railway porter been a Frenchman, an Italian, or a Spaniard, he would have been duly screwed down and carried away, insensible, but still alive, to the cemetery. Into any consideration of the waking up of the supposed dead man, the mind, appalled, shrinks from entering. Who that has visited the Musee Wirth at Brussels has not turned away shuddering from that ineffably ghastly picture of the living hand and arm, corrugated with the supreme agony of effort, protruding from the half-raised lid of a coffin too hastily nailed down ? There is do corpse within that bier, but a living creature vainly striving to burst his cerements. Cases of premature interment are, there is every reason to believe, lamentably prevalent on the continent; especially when cholera or other epidemics are raging. The most serious objection to the English system lies in the fact that it is only the corpses of paupers which are conveyed to mortuaries, and that the supply of dead-houses, even for paupers, is insufficient. The remains of the respectable classes are coffined among the living, and are permitted to remain there for days together, poisoning the atmqsphere and horrifying the survivors.

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