PREMATURE BURIAL.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1154, 15 June 1911, Page 6

PREMATURE BURIAL.

— »- UNUSUAL PROVISION IN A WILL. By TclecraDh— Press Association—Oopyriebt London, June 13. In order to prevent any possibility of his 'premature burial, the late Sir Israel Hart, the well-known Leicester merchant, has directed t'aat an artery in his body must be severed before he is buried.

SOME GEUESOME STORIES. Tho elderly lady who carries a certificate of her own death was not present, and there seemed to bo fewer very old persons than usual, but the annual meeting of tho Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial, held in London on May ■1, at the fiaxton Hall, was, according, to the "Manchester Guardian," the largest of. rc-cent years. Mr. George Greenwood was in the chair, and about seventy were present, making an audience with a character of its own quite different from any other in London. There is a pressureof earnestness and anxietv that makes it strangely homogeneous, although one would have to search London to find people more diverse in appearance and class of life. Here a man like a cabman with a white handkerchief tied around his neck; thero an aged doctor with a West End manner. A worn-looking man with a black skullcap sat alone in a far corner. A pretty girl with, a young brother sometimes led the applause. Afterwards tho whole audience took tea together at tho invitation of a lndy member. Mr. 'Greenwood said that tho Bill promoted by tho association to prevent the possibility of premature burial by ensuring that a certificate signed by a qualified medical man who had examined the body be produced before burial can take place had passed its first reading. Dr. Stenson Ilookor's first point was that we did not really know what death was. We knew stoppage of the heart, dropping of the jaw. coldness; but what exactly was death? The one really definite test was decomposition. He told a pmiesome story of erics coming from a coffin at the moment the truck was wheeling it down the little rail into the furnace. Dr. Brindley James said that a coffin contained enough air to support life for twenty minutes. Ho told the story again of the old lady, a member-of the society, who had been laid out and placed in her coffin, and heard her friends speaking about her, and was unable to move until her eyelid twitched. Happily her daughter saw it, and in a minute had her in a hot -bnth. She ultimately recovered, and every tiny she looks at her, own death certificate. A lsdy member told a story about an old cemetery in York being dug up, and of the 12(10 corpfos six showed signs of moving and twisting in tho coflina.