The fear of "being buried alive" - or what is known as "tavophobia" - was a common phobia in the past, and was particularly prevalent during the 18th century.
In a report published by the French newspaper "Le Figaro", the writer Tristan Fay says that the priest of the Diocese of Poitiers in France - who died in Paris in 1705 - was one of the most prominent figures of that period who suffered from a fear of being buried alive.
The priest wrote in his will, "Anytime God wills to call me, I want my body to be as guarded as possible without disturbance until you are absolutely certain of my death, with specific signs. It does not mean that I am so attached to life, but I know many examples of those who They were buried alive, which makes me afraid of the feelings I might experience in that state.”
One of the most famous examples of this disease during the 19th century is what was quoted from the composer and composer Frédéric Chopin and the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who apparently inherited the phobia of " being buried alive" from their parents.
What is the origin of this fear?
This fear is seen as being as old as humanity, and the product of the accumulation of different experiences.
The writer Susan Necker - in a pamphlet she issued in 1790 entitled "The Urgent Burial" - points to her fears of being buried alive, and tells many stories about people who regained consciousness after being placed in the grave, and various techniques to ensure that death is real or not.
Fifty years before Necker's book, French-Danish physician Jacques Benigni Winslow was the first to raise practical questions about this phobia and contributed to making it a public health issue with a thesis in which he questioned whether surgical experiments were more appropriate than any other experiments to discover visible signs of death. doubtful.
The first published work was translated into Latin, and Dr. Jacques-Jean Brouher commented extensively on it in 1742, adding more than 200 pages to it, and then adding a second volume in 1745 in which he collected a number of horrific stories.
The title of the new book was "A Treatise on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death and the Arrogance of a Hasty Burial and Mummification", and explains that the signs usually used - until then - to describe death (immobility, pallor, lack of reaction, breathing and pulse) are largely inadequate.
According to the book, the rotting of the body was the conclusive evidence of death, which is probably the reason why many peoples leave the bodies of their dead at least a day before burial.
The book was so popular that one of the most famous doctors at the time - Antoine Louis - took up the issue 10 years later.
In 1752 the young member of the Royal Academy of Surgery, who was famous for being one of the designers of the guillotine, published letters about the certainty of the signs of death.
In addition to warning of the early burials that were common at the time, Lewis established two criteria to distinguish between real death and the signs of apparent death, namely, the hardness of the body and the sagging of the eyes.
Professor Ann Carroll indicated - in an article published in 2015 entitled "A Medical History of Death Standards" - that Prueher and Lewis' fear of the danger of being buried alive, and their focus on the true signs of death, was the basis for setting new standards and medicalizing burials, as burials became necessary. To a death certificate issued by a doctor to be legal.