Virtual Book Tour: Books Worth a Look

Welsh medical historian Jan Bondeson wrote an entire book about live burial. It's called, no surprise, Buried Alive. Came out about three years ago. Bondeson not only knows everything about the subject, but he owns a private collection of old (i.e., pre-stethoscope and EEG) medical devices designed to determine for certain that a patient was dead: nipple pincers, hand-cranked tongue pullers, and a rococo bagpipe-like affair designed to administer tobacco enemas up the -- as Bondeson genteely calls it -- "rear passage." If they weren't dead yet, they probably longed to be.