Buried Alive

One of the obsessions of the nineteenth century was burial before death. Physicians and propagandists claimed to have collected evidence of hundreds of near misses and actual cases, and the subject was extremely popular in literature, most notably in the work of Edgar Allen Poe. Buried Alive considers a phenomenon which impinged on the Victorian imagination so strongly that expensive and often gruesome measures were taken to ensure that one was definitely dead before burial. Jan Bondeson has compiled a social history of a fear that prompted the invention of security coffins with bellropes or hatches and the establishment of