394 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by law. If the " dead " awake in that time it is well. If not, they 

 are doomed, and no one — not even a father or a mother, a husband or 

 a wife — can save them from the hands of the grave-digger. This was 

 the case with the poor woman of Molise. Her friends had doubts as 

 to one, at least, of the deaths — that of the unborn babe — but the doc- 

 tor was inexorable. He refused to operate on the " corpse " to save 

 the infant-life, and the syndic, approving of his conduct, ordered the 

 body to be buried. The funeral took place exactly at the twenty-fourth 

 hour — that is to say that the body (being a poor one) was thrown into 

 the ground like a dog. Dog-like, too, it had no rights, for a few days 

 afterward it was unearthed to make room for another corpse — that 

 of a girl — which was to be thrown in over it. But the becchini (the 

 grave-diggers) perceived while doing their work that the woman buried 

 the week before " had moved in the grave." Her hands were up to 

 her mouth ; her eyes were wide open and staring frightfully — she had 

 been trying to bite the bands by which her wrists were fastened. But 

 the bands of her legs were rent asunder, and there, in the dust beside 

 her, was a dead child ! The woman and the babe (a boy) whom law 

 and medical incapacity had slain were taken out of the earth to be 

 medically examined and legally provided for, and the new corpse (was 

 it a corpse ?) was thrown in in their stead. The doctor and the syndic 

 were arrested, and condemned to three months' imprisonment, and the 

 mother and child were buried again with two medical certificates in- 

 stead of one. The legal authorities — somewhat late in the day — wished 

 to do everything in " proper form," and the child, born in the grave, 

 procured for its mother a second burial. 



This horrible crime — the crime of burying a woman alive and mur- 

 dering an unborn babe five or six feet underground by medical sanc- 

 tion — could with difiiculty have occurred in England. English law 

 provides an interval of a week (more or less) between death and burial, 

 and the seeming-dead may in a week's time return to life — that is to 

 say, that the body, with the suspended life dormant within it, may, by 

 chance or by medical treatment, reassume its functions, or a portion 

 of its functions, before burial has become a legal or a sanitary neces- 

 sity ; but it can not be stated with certainty that all persons buried 

 in a northern climate — such a climate, for instance, as England — are 

 in reality dead after the delay of a week has been accorded. Hasty 

 and sudden burials are not always a question of climate or of temper- 

 ature. In times of pestilence the week's delay is in many cases, even 

 in northern climates, reduced to a few hours ; and in Italy, where the 

 minimum interval between death and burial is a day and a night, and 

 the maximum two days and two nights, the victims (or the supposed 

 victims) of epidemic are buried as soon as dead — that is to say, as 

 soon as they appear to be dead, which, in exceptional times, amounts 

 much to the same thing. The manifest blunder is that of supposing 

 all dead persons — i. e., all persons dying in days of pestilence — to be 



