The Hour of Our Death
by Philippe Ariès |
Death
by Robert Wilkins |
After the Funeral
by Edwin Murphy | 
How They Croaked
by Georgia Bragg | 
A Treasury of Deception
by Michael Farquhar |
The Lazarus syndrome
by Rodney Davies | 
Seven Wonders of the Industrial World
by Deborah Cadbury |
What the Butler Saw
by E. S. Turner | 
Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts
by Penny Colman |
Compass
by Alan Gurney |
Love Stories
by Jonathan Ned Katz | 
Origin Story
by David Christian | 
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
by Caitlin Doughty |
Napoleon's Privates
by Tony Perrottet |
Captain Bligh's Portable Nightmare
by John Toohey | 
On Monsters
by Stephen T. Asma | 
The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons
by Sam Kean | 
The Naked Ape
by Desmond Morris | 
Crazy Like Us
by Ethan Watters | 
The Social Leap
by William von Hippel |
Readers of Edgar Allan Poe's tales--just think of The Premature Burial--may comfort themselves with the notion that Poe must have exaggerated: surely people of the 1800s could not have been at risk of being buried alive? But such stories filled medical journals as well as fiction, and fear in the populace was high. It was speculated, from the number of skeletons found in horrific, contorted positions inside their coffins, that ten out of every one hundred people were buried before they were dead. With over fifty illustrations, Buried Alive explores the medicine, folklore, history, and literature of Europe and the United States to uncover why such fears arose and whether they were warranted.