Apparent death

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Apparent death (also lat. Vita reducta or Vita minima = the reduced or low life) is an outdated term for a state in which a person is unconscious and apparently dead, so that it is unclear whether he is still alive or dead. This was based on the fact that for a long time doctors could only determine whether a person was still alive or dead with the help of pulse control , listening to the heartbeat and perception of breathing .

Medical history

To determine whether a person is simply unconscious or whether death has actually occurred, doctors used to have only simple aids at their disposal, which Johann Georg Krünitz describes in the Economic Encyclopedia of the 18th century. "Scheintoten" (first used as a German noun in 1788) a mirror was held in front of the mouth to see whether it was fogged up by the breath. Other aids were candles and feathers that were held in front of the nose, or a glass of water that was placed on the chest to see by the movement of the water whether it rose and fell easily.

"As for the external stimulants and the surgical attempts to irritate the nostrils with rough feathers, salts, salmiac , or the flat hand and soles of the feet with stitches, and to cup the shoulders, arms, or other parts , these aids sometimes have apparent deaths, like red-hot iron on the sole of the foot, brought back to life. "

- Economic Encyclopedia

In every case of doubt, resuscitation measures were used.

“You inject pepper and salt solution into your mouth. You blow, mouth to mouth, with your nose closed, slowly into the lungs of the apparently dead man. He is given enema of table salt about 2 to 3 Loth of the same dissolved in warm water, or tobacco dissolving. Tobacco smoke cysts also belong here, if an instrument is available. "

- from Krünitz

As the entry point of death we see today is usually the moment in which the respiratory and cardiac activity ( cardiac arrest , which potentially even reversible clinical death ) or brain activity goes out ( brain death , the final Individualtod). In the opinion of forensic doctors, in order to protect the diagnosing doctor from a criminally relevant misdiagnosis , care should be taken to ensure that the doctor is informed until the death spots appear (first signs recognizable no later than 30 minutes after death) or until some other reliable proof (ten-minute EKG zero line, evidence of brain death by electroencephalography ) continues with resuscitation measures . Due to modern medical diagnostics , the death of a person can be determined in any case, the term apparent death is no longer used for states of unconsciousness and coma .

In the 19th century, however, the term was still widely used in medicine. After Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland had drawn attention to the problem of apparent death as early as the 18th century and thus helped to encourage the construction of morgues, he wrote a treatise entitled Der Scheintod in 1808 , in which he tried to deal with the state of unconsciousness and asphyxia differentiate it from death using various characteristics. At that time, apparent death occurred most frequently in newborns, in (apparently) drowned, frozen, hanged or strangled people.

"Apparent death occurs under the most varied of circumstances [...] 1) S. through internal illnesses. This includes the deep fainting after being very tired from long marches, after having overcome difficult births, and also after severe convulsions in hysteria , epilepsy and eclampsia , in stiffness and lethargy , sometimes in cholera , in some narcotic poisoning ( opium , hydrogen cyanide , Chloroform ). 2) S. by external disturbances: after high degrees of concussion , after severe wounds with simultaneous concussion or with significant blood loss, after heavy bleeding in general, especially in women who have recently given birth and small children. 3) S. by specific causes. This subheading includes the S. of newborns because breathing has not yet been initiated, the S. from drowning, hanging etc., the S. from irrespirable gases, from foreign bodies in the throat etc. "

- Meyers Konversationslexikon , 1895

Cultural history

The phenomenon of apparent death already played a role in ancient times. With the Romans, so-called Pollinctores had the task of washing the dead several times with warm water, closing their eyes and calling them several times by name. If they did not give any sign of life, they were placed on the floor and covered with a cloth. Reports of reawakened "apparent dead" have come down to us from , among others, Valerius Maximus , Plutarch and Democritus .

From the 17th to the 19th centuries, during the Age of Enlightenment , there was fear in Europe of being buried alive , of waking up in the grave and dying to death in fear of suffocation. There were repeated reports of corpses that are said to have been in strange positions after the exhumation : Often the eyes were wide open or the arms were pressed against the top of the coffin. There were also reports of scratches on the inside of the upper part of the coffin which the deceased are said to have scratched into the wood with their bare fingers. For this reason, storage periods were often set in wills or it was ordered that the wrists should be cut before a burial. In addition, there were special devices, such as coffins filled with gas, open coffins that were filled with earth to cause rapid death from suffocation, or open coffins with ladders that were supposed to offer the possibility of climbing out of the grave. Emperor Joseph II issued a sanitary ordinance that allowed the dead to be buried after 48 hours at the earliest, as was also formulated in a law passed in Württemberg in 1780. This should make a burial of the seemingly dead less likely.

In Austria-Hungary and up to 1900 in Switzerland one could have the heart stabbed : a doctor sticks a dagger into the heart of the deceased, where it remains. Others had small bells hung on their fingers or feet or a signal device was attached to the coffin. At the end of the 18th century, public morgues were built due to the uncertainty of death determinations carried out by mirror tests or pulse testing and an increasing fear of being buried alive . In Meyer's Konversationslexikon it is stated at the end of the 19th century: “Experience has shown that in the best-equipped mortuary halls (Munich, Weimar) for many years and among many thousands of cases it has never been the case that a body deposited there has the slightest sign of life The chief medical officer Ernst Gottlieb Steudel from Esslingen had already expressed himself in a similar way in 1849 and referred to the cost of the death examinations for pseudo-death diagnostics, which in his opinion was too high in relation to the benefit.

Many traditions of apparent deaths have anecdotal traits. In fact, there is a high probability of misdiagnosis in epidemics when a large number of illnesses and deaths occurred within a short period of time. The story of “ dear Augustin ”, a Viennese original, which played in taverns at the time of the plague and was thrown into a mass grave together with victims of the plague , was relatively well known . Since it was not yet filled, it was not immediately covered with earth and the "dear Augustine" could soberly climb out of the grave again.

For example, Johann Nestroy , Edgar Allan Poe , Friederike Kempner , Hans Christian Andersen and Alfred Nobel were afraid of being buried alive . Dostoevsky regularly put notes next to his bed: "If I fall into lethargic sleep, I won't be buried ... days ago!"

In the literature, the subject of apparent death was taken up again in 2012 by the writer Francis Nenik in his novel xo and the numerous methods carried out in the morgue to secure death from apparent death as well as the funeral customs associated with the fear of apparent death (bells over the graves, Speaking tubes etc.) described in detail.

exhibition

In the Medical History Museum of the Charité (Berlin), the exhibition, which will run until March 31, 2019, began on April 20, 2018 to illustrate the history of the subject of apparent death. About the uncertainty of death and the fear of being buried alive .

See also

literature

  • Margrit Augener: Apparent death as a medical problem in the 18th century. med. Diss. Kiel 1965.
  • Axel W. Bauer : apparent death. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1291.
  • Dominik Groß : The treatment of apparent death in the medical legislation of the Kingdom of Württemberg (1806-1918). In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 16, 1997, pp. 15-33.
  • Tankred Koch: Buried alive. History and stories of apparent death. Edition Leipzig, 1990, ISBN 3-361-00299-0 .
  • Martin Patak: The fear of apparent death in the 2nd half of the 18th century. med. Dissertation Zurich 1967.
  • Steffen Schäfer: Apparent death. On the trail of old fears. Morgenbuch Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-371-00375-2 .
  • Ingrid Stoessel: apparent death and agony. Forms of expression of fear in their historical changes (17th-20th centuries). med. Diss. Cologne 1983.
  • Christian August Struve: The life tester or application of the Galvanodesmos invented by me to determine the true from the apparent death to prevent the living being buried. Hanover 1805.
  • Falk Wiesemann : Fear also has its fashion. The fear of apparent death in the age of enlightenment and romance . Klartext, Essen 2004, ISBN 3-89861-018-7 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Scheintod  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Johann Peter Frank : About the danger of being buried alive and about a burial that is too late. In: Johann Peter Frank (Hrsg.): System of a complete medical police. Volume 4, Mannheim 1788, pp. 672-749.
  2. ↑ a b apparent death. In: Johann Georg Krünitz: Economic Encyclopedia.
  3. ↑ Thomas Görger: Apparent death - woman died in the morgue. (No longer available online.) WDR , March 8, 2002, archived from the original on September 8, 2005 ; Retrieved May 30, 2012 .
  4. ↑ Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland: About the uncertainty of death and the only infallible means to convince oneself of its reality and to make it impossible to bury alive; along with news of the construction of a morgue in Weimar. Weimar 1791.
  5. ↑ Tankred Koch: Buried alive. History and stories of apparent death. 1990, p. 34.
  6. ↑ Tankred Koch: Buried alive. History and stories of apparent death. 1990, p. 35 ff.
  7. ↑ Benjamin Georg Peßler : Easily applicable assistance of the mechanics to rescue apparent deaths when awakening in the grave in the cheapest way . Brunswick 1798.
  8. ↑ Dominik Groß: The treatment of apparent death in the medical legislation of the Kingdom of Württemberg (1806-1918). In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 16, 1997, pp. 15-33; here: p. 16.
  9. ^ Axel W. Bauer : The pathography of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. Possibilities and problems of a retrospective diagnosis. In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 25, 2006, pp. 153-173, here: p. 153.
  10. ^ Manfred Wenzel: Morgues. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 836 f.
  11. ↑ EG von Steudel: old building and new building of the medical essence in Württemberg taking into account the corresponding conditions in other countries and the new suggestions for improvement. Esslingen 1849, p. 43 f.
  12. ↑ Tankred Koch: Buried alive. History and stories of apparent death. 1990, p. 66.
  13. ^ Jacques Catteau: Dostoevsky and the process of literary creation. Cambridge 2003, p. 103.
  14. ^ Francis Nenik: xo (novel). (PDF) Retrieved January 26, 2012 .
  15. ↑ bmm-charite.de
  16. ↑ Ulrike Henning: A coffin with ventilation. Why Brecht was stabbed in the heart posthumously: An exhibition in Berlin traces the fear of apparent death and being buried alive to the present day. In: New Germany. 5th / 6th May 2018, p. 23.
  17. ↑ Astrid Viciano: A bit dead. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. 7th / 8th July 2018, p. 36 f.