![](https://images.insidemystery.com/posts/6322/oKcY6shiRXaTkXr6fNc8p0vaAwkSwQk07EgtouhL.jpeg)
Medicine used to be completely unreliable. Literally, people used to get buried alive ALL the time.
It wasn't until the 19th century that medicine advanced far enough to determine that a person was dead, in a coma, or just paralyzed.
For some reason, doctors didn't determine that a person was dead based on their heartbeat and prolonged brain function. If a patient was sitting straight up and not moving for long periods of time, had their eyes open, and was somewhat coherent, there was a possibility that they could be deemed deceased, depending on the doctor.
This stemmed from a problem with "percieved" medicine reigning over scientific medicine.
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For this particular reason, it was common for coffin makers to build safety releases into the coffins they made.
Not like that would solve anything since a fair deal of professionally buried coffins were dropped so deep and violently into the ground that the person within it was unlikely to survive the fall/lack of oxygen.
If that didn't kill them, the 4 tons of dirt above them, practically cementing them underground would have. There was a major flaw in this drop mechanism that was never really got thought through. But, any kind of comfort helped address the uneducated population properly back then.