Tony Page
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These People Miraculously Came Back to Life—Suggesting Death Isn’t a ‘Binary State,’ Doctor Claims
Below are excerpts from a recent article in Popular Mechanics.
This is a scenario I was always afraid of, for me it's scary.
"A woman was pronounced dead—and then a funeral home employee found her gasping for air in a body bag.
About two hours after the body of 74-year-old Constance Glanz arrived at the Butherus, Maser, and Love funeral home outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, in June 2024, an employee there noticed something strange. Glanz, who had been pronounced dead at a nearby nursing home, was breathing.
In fact, cases of mistaken death are rare, but not unprecedented.
In June 2023, a 76-year-old Ecuadorian woman was declared dead after a suspected stroke. Five hours later, she was found alive after her coffin was opened to change her clothing. Months earlier, an Iowa woman was taken to a funeral home where workers found her gasping for air in a body bag. Back in 2020, paramedics declared dead a woman in Michigan with cerebral palsy; hours later, the mortician preparing to embalm her body found her breathing. And in 2018, a South African woman who was initially declared dead following a road accident was discovered alive in a mortuary refrigerator.
So why all the confusion and anxiety? “The typical signs of death—even lack of respiration and lack of a pulse—do not guarantee death,” Eble says. “There really is no infallible sign except for putrefaction, when the body begins to decompose.”
Thankfully, we don’t usually wait for bodies to rot before we call the coroner, so today’s doctors must adhere to certain guidelines in order to legally pronounce a patient dead.
The way we declare death dates back to a task force President Jimmy Carter convened in 1980. Together, neurosurgeons, theologians, historians, and other experts worked to establish a universal definition of death. The previous decades had seen medical advances like ventilators and defibrillators that could mechanically force the lungs and heart to function. Given medicine’s newfound capacity to keep people alive interminably using machines, the task force’s job was to decide what, exactly, should constitute death.
In the end, the task force decided that a person could be declared dead when they had “sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.” Nearly all 50 states adopted the resulting Uniform Determination of Death Act."
Below are excerpts from a recent article in Popular Mechanics.
This is a scenario I was always afraid of, for me it's scary.
"A woman was pronounced dead—and then a funeral home employee found her gasping for air in a body bag.
About two hours after the body of 74-year-old Constance Glanz arrived at the Butherus, Maser, and Love funeral home outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, in June 2024, an employee there noticed something strange. Glanz, who had been pronounced dead at a nearby nursing home, was breathing.
In fact, cases of mistaken death are rare, but not unprecedented.
In June 2023, a 76-year-old Ecuadorian woman was declared dead after a suspected stroke. Five hours later, she was found alive after her coffin was opened to change her clothing. Months earlier, an Iowa woman was taken to a funeral home where workers found her gasping for air in a body bag. Back in 2020, paramedics declared dead a woman in Michigan with cerebral palsy; hours later, the mortician preparing to embalm her body found her breathing. And in 2018, a South African woman who was initially declared dead following a road accident was discovered alive in a mortuary refrigerator.
So why all the confusion and anxiety? “The typical signs of death—even lack of respiration and lack of a pulse—do not guarantee death,” Eble says. “There really is no infallible sign except for putrefaction, when the body begins to decompose.”
Thankfully, we don’t usually wait for bodies to rot before we call the coroner, so today’s doctors must adhere to certain guidelines in order to legally pronounce a patient dead.
The way we declare death dates back to a task force President Jimmy Carter convened in 1980. Together, neurosurgeons, theologians, historians, and other experts worked to establish a universal definition of death. The previous decades had seen medical advances like ventilators and defibrillators that could mechanically force the lungs and heart to function. Given medicine’s newfound capacity to keep people alive interminably using machines, the task force’s job was to decide what, exactly, should constitute death.
In the end, the task force decided that a person could be declared dead when they had “sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.” Nearly all 50 states adopted the resulting Uniform Determination of Death Act."
