"Buried Alive" sheds light on one of those completely ridiculous yet deadly serious manias that pop up in human history now and then, like comic relief from the usual wars, famines and reality-based TV shows. In this case, that mania was an extravagant fear of being buried alive -- a fear that gripped the two most civilized nations in Europe and that lasted on and off for close to 150 years. Germany takes the top prize for this craze, with France coming in a close second, but both America and Britain had their moments as well. Bondeson's achievement here is to have unearthed a bizarre chapter of social history that, as far as I know, is almost completely unknown outside of those ghoulish circles frequented by specialists in burial customs.

Maybe certain moments in the development of the human race are simply too embarrassing to remember.

Bondeson, God bless him and keep him from having some burial reformer blow tobacco smoke up his anus with a pipe after his departure in order to establish that he is truly dead, has researched his subject to the point of ludicrousness. He ranges with authority from its folkloric roots to its wacky historical applications to its literary texts to its medical realities, and he backs everything up with voluminous citations from obscure sources in most of the major European languages, with a little Latin translation thrown in for good measure. If you are looking for someone who can tell you every article that was in the premiere 1909 issue of the unlamented American magazine Perils of Premature Burial, Bondeson is your man. (An 18th century illustration of a physician engaged in the tobacco-enema diagnosis described above is accompanied by the credit "From the author's collection.") This is a good thing. Some subjects are like bottle-cap collections: Without obsessiveness, without maniacal thoroughness, there's really no point.

Bondeson, a medical doctor and professor at the University of Wales College of Medicine who has written several popular works on medical oddities, says he was inspired to write this book after appearing in an American TV documentary titled "Buried Alive" -- in which, as he cheerfully notes, "my own contribution was filmed in the crypt under the Kensal Green cemetery in London, full of decaying coffins." Bondeson brings a mercifully light touch to his lugubrious subject.

He starts his book by examining what the ancients knew about the medical questions at the heart of his book -- the "signs of death," the physical evidence that allows observers to be certain that life has ended. Like their successors, Bondeson notes that "already in classical antiquity some observers were aware that the criteria of death might sometimes be fallible." Indeed, it appears that in important ways the knowledge of the ancients was comparable to that possessed by many doctors as late as the mid-18th century. Much Greek and Roman medical learning was lost in the Middle Ages, however, and this subject remained singularly opaque for centuries. In fact, physicians did not gain definitive knowledge about the signs of death until this century. Even in the 19th century, many doctors were incompetent at diagnosing death -- to the point where they openly confessed they couldn't tell a dead man from a living one. In the 17th and 18th century, this uncertainty provided grist for the mill of well-meaning alarmists who suddenly proclaimed -- on the scantiest but most lurid of evidence -- that alarming numbers of people were being buried alive.

The most influential of the burial reformers was a French physician named Jean-Jacques Bruhier d'Ablaincourt. Bruhier came upon a 1740 treatise, written in Latin, on the signs of death, written by a Danish-born anatomist named Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, who argued provocatively that "although the modern, surgical tests of death or life were better than the primitive, traditional signs of death used among the people, they were still too uncertain to be relied upon. The onset of putrefaction was the only reliable indicator that an individual had died." The result of this uncertainty, Winslow concluded, was that people were in imminent danger of being buried alive.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"