'The Rigid Embrace of the Narrow House': Premature Burial & The Signs of Death

Abstract

Imagine, if you will, an earlier era when people knew enough about death transadt the business of society-to cover the corpse, bury the dead, transmit authority.1 In those days death was a simple and an irreversible process, and medical intervention was limited in scope and effectiveness. The dying person might suffer from physical pain, emotional loss, and fear of an afterlife, but some peculiarly modem anxieties did not exist. He or she did not have to fear that life-sustaining medical technologies would blur the line between life and death, that medical intervention might continue in death, or that it might cease in life. The moment of death was clear-cut and final. This view of