It was not always easy to tell if a corpse was really dead

Determine if the dead were actually killed was a bewildering and inaccurate science before the advent of modern medicine. But fear was not entirely irrational. Throughout the history there have been numerous cases of people accidentally buried alive and curious legends spoke of open caskets where he was a corpse with a long beard, or the palms of the hands raised up, or destroyed by the effort of having tried to escape ...

Some people were so afraid to wake up in a coffin who left explicit instructions that his heart was being stabbed and his throat cut before being buried.

So, and as a result of that fear, or "taphophobia" (taphos Greek, meaning "grave" and that translates as "fear of graves"), different techniques were used to establish the definitive nature of the alleged deceased.

It is said that Paracelsus (1493-1541), alchemist and perhaps the greatest physician of his time, got the resuscitation of a corpse using bellows, a trick that was probably collected from Arabic medical writings.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were given enemas snuff smoke or are pinched her nipples with pliers.

Another system was vigorously pulling the tongue of the alleged corpse, coming to do is use a clamp machine for at least three hours, and continuously subjected to the strong pulls.

Also in the eighteenth century, the Danish anatomist Jacob Winslow (1669-1760) devised a method based on tickling the nose with a feather, whip the skin with nettles or drive needles under toenails. Any value to ensure not being buried alive.

Although, supposedly, some victims were returned to their lives during this torture, the scientific community believed that the only true sign of death was putrefaction.

Thus, it is advised that any person who is presumed dead was to be placed in a warm place for signs of decomposition before burial. Calls were "waiting mortuaries".

In the nineteenth century, technological development in this quest to avoid a premature burial culminated in the "safety coffin", an invention that would allow mistakenly buried communicate with the world above them. Most models include an air tube and a device that allowed notify the back surface of the buried life, blowing a horn, or raising a flag. There was a model that included a brass mechanical hammer to hit the lid of a coffin.

Other designs included ladders, escape hatches and even tubes for transferring food. Another would allow the individual buried prematurely threw a firecracker through the air duct of the coffin.Some even came to be also equipped with a shovel.

An urban legend says that the saying "Saved by the Bell 'derives from the fact that some of these" safety coffins "put on a string that was tied to a bell on the outside, which would alert the person recently buried yet would not have died.

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