Raising the (Apparently) Dead

Long before CPR or the appropriate application of defibrillators, medical experts were doing their damnedest to bring back the dead. In celebration of Inkling’s own revival, the approach of Halloween and—of course—our particular fondness for non-scientific science—we bring you a historical overview of these heroic, and often woefully misguided, pursuits. 

Throughout most of human history, any case of successful resuscitation was credited not to human ingenuity, but to divine intervention. No one but Death himself, it was thought, could relinquish his iron grip upon the dead. Despite this, human ingenuity flourished. We have a long and glorious history of shocking and offensive attempts to rile the dead back into annoyed animation. Poking needles into them, say. Or punching them in the face. (Both these resuscitation techniques were documented in ancient texts). Anyone unfortunate enough to lapse into deep unconsciousness in the Middle Ages might have been whipped repeatedly with stinging nettles by Good Samaritans hoping to flagellate him or her to life. 

Some ancient revivers took a rather obvious tack towards awakening the dead. Since dead bodies were cold bodies, it also came to be believed that the application of heat had the power to resuscitate. Hot ashes or even burning excrement (!) were sometimes heaped directly onto inert chests in an attempt to restore the warmth of the living from the outside. It may seem counter-intuitive to try to raise the dead with procedures that could well kill a person, but I suppose there is a sort of cheerful “No harm, no foul!” logic to these early tactics. After all, either you were definitively dead, in which case having your flesh singed wouldn’t harm you, or you still had some spark of life left in you, in which case even the most drastic measures would be worth it.

Some long-dead (ahem) methods of resuscitation were as much an assault on the late lamented’s dignity as anything else. This is especially true with the method of resuscitation known, distressingly, as “rectal fumigation with tobacco.” By the 18th century, it was known that tobacco was a powerful stimulant, and it was also believed that its capacity to arouse physiological or nervous system activity was especially potent in the intestines. As a result, one very common resuscitation technique involved filling a pair of bellows with tobacco smoke and puffing it into the victim’s rectum. Yes, you read that right. Dead people were forced to smoke through their rear-ends. So popular was this practice that it did not end until it was demonstrated that just a few ounces of tobacco introduced in this way would kill both dogs and cats—something which the brave British physiologist Benjamin Brodie thought to do in 1811.

There are reports from about the same time of such objects as corncobs and the beaks of ravens being used for the same violent purpose on stillborn newborns; the former seem uncomfortably large and the latter uncomfortably sharp, but perhaps I am clinging too closely to modern standards of care here. Other then-current neonatal resuscitation techniques included pinching, tickling, pulling on the tongue, swinging the baby upside down by the arms (with the cautionary note that slick birth fluids should be dried off first so as not to add to the unconscious baby’s troubles a swift journey through the air), and—notable for its simplicity—simply yelling loudly at the infant until it woke up and deigned to suck in some air. By the late nineteenth century, the startling mustard-up-the-nose method of reviving babies (popular a hundred years before) had gone out of style, but it was still common for physicians to use a nebulizer to create a fine mist of brandy in a breathing mask that was placed over the baby’s nose and mouth. Brandy for blue babies!

As anatomical science advanced, some resuscitation techniques at least took into consideration a basic understanding of the physiological principles behind respiration: In Europe and the United States at the beginning of the 19th century, drowning victims were frequently strapped onto the backs of horses, which were then sent trotting up and down the beach. It was hoped that the vigorous up-and-down motion of the horse’s back against the victim’s torso would cause the lungs to alternately compress and expand, forcing the return of airflow. Modern CPR techniques, though far less dramatic, are based on the same principle. In fact, the rate at which a horse typically canters—99 strides per minute—is very close to the currently recommended rate of 100 compressions per minute of CPR. Maybe they really did know what they were doing back then.

During the same period, Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani and his nephew Aldini began experimenting with the somewhat disreputable science of galvanism (using powerful electric currents to attempt to revive dead tissues into vitality), a deliciously grisly precursor to modern defibrillation techniques (it is Galvani to whom we owe the wonderful verb galvanize. Though their series of gruesome experiments on dogs, frogs, rabbits, oxes, and executed criminals never actually succeeded in raising the dead, the pair did titillate large audiences of aristocrats, scholars, and professionals with their demonstrations. Horror and delight mingle spookily in the testimony of one witness to the attempted resuscitation of a convicted murderer who had been hanged an hour previously: “The jaws of the deceased criminal began immediately to quiver; the adjoining muscles were contorted most horribly and one eye actually opened!”

Alarming and undignified as they may seem to us today, there’s something comforting about the inventiveness of these artifacts of the history of resuscitation. After all, there’s nothing dignified about death itself: it’s messy, cruel, and often degrading. We’re lucky to be living in the age of CPR, automated external defibrillators, and epinephrine shots, but even these tools of modern science only push death away a small fraction of the time. It’s a solace, in the face of that fact, to look back and know that truly—we’ve tried everything else.

For more morbid musings, check out Anna’s Death Map post.