If the corpse withstood these vigorous ministrations without happy Effects, it was time for Phase 2 -- a Foucault-like regimen in which the well-meaning doctors would literally get medieval on its ass. After cutting the soles of the deceased's feet with razors and thrusting long needles under its toenails, various options were available, including burning the soles of the deceased's feet with a red-hot iron and pouring boiling wax on its forehead. If all else failed, a French clergyman "suggested that a red-hot poker be thrust up the unfortunate corpse's rear quarters." It is not recorded whether this latter method ever revived anyone -- and if it did with what words the awakened individual saluted the attending medical personnel.

Despite these eye-opening details, Winslow's thesis was destined for academic obscurity. But Bruhier, who had his finger on the presumably robust pulse of the reading public, gave it a far wider readership. Not only did he translate it into French soon after Winslow's Latin edition appeared, he jazzed it up by adding a lengthy section of his own in which he cites numerous "cases" which "proved" that premature burial was a serious social problem.

The examples cited by Bruhier in this and his subsequent publications are instructive, for they include many of the archetypal cases of supposed premature burial. For example, he cites cases of corpses that were discovered, when exhumed, to have devoured parts of their own bodies, in particular their fingers -- a grotesque reaction, he and other like-minded reformers were sure, to the victim's hideous discovery that he or she had been buried alive. (In fact, as Bondeson points out, such grisly mutilations, which are found in many apocryphal tales of premature burial, were likely to have been the result of rodents.) He also cites a recurring tale, which Bondeson dubs "The Lady With the Ring," about a woman who was buried with a valuable ring on her finger; when thieves broke in and attempted to steal the ring, the lady would wake up.

Another such tale, "The Lecherous Monk," tells the story of a young monk stopping at an inn who is asked by the grieving innkeeper and his wife to watch over the corpse of their beautiful young daughter. Left alone, the monk "forgot the sanctity of his vows and took liberties with the corpse." His ministrations not only revive the corpse but leave her pregnant; when the monk happens to return to the inn nine months later, she has a newborn baby. He immediately tells the parents that he is the child's father and offers to marry her. They accept the handsome young man's offer with alacrity, even though, as Bondeson dryly notes, he had "confessed, in so many words, to having raped their daughter while he presumed her to be a corpse."

Bruhier promoted such yarns as if they bolstered his case. In fact, both the Lady With the Ring and the Lecherous Monk are folktales, legends found in several different cultures. Their appeal, Bondeson notes, has strong elements of necrophilia and sadism -- which, the reading public's tastes not having changed in 250 years, presumably did not hurt sales of Bruhier's book. With a credulity that one can only regard as deplorable in that pre-"Ally McBeal" era, Bruhier also accepts as gospel various tales then current about "fasting girls" who could live for years without taking nourishment of any kind, as well as incredible stories of people who had survived being underwater for hours, days and even, in one highly fishy case, six weeks.

Bruhier's book was very popular and translated into several languages, including -- crucially -- German. For some reason that Bondeson never explores, the news that people were at risk of being buried alive fell upon the Teutonic ear like a metaphysical dinner bell. For the next half-century, at least, the vaunted "land of poets and philosophers" became the land of carefully arranged corpses, neatly lined up in "waiting mortuaries" staffed with attendants waiting for them to suddenly sit up and ring for help. Not even France was as initially taken with the idea as Germany -- although, in a later development that casts grave doubt on the touted Gallic rationality, the French became obsessed with premature burial just around the time the Germans became aware that they had been sold a coffin full of hot air.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"