7. Brushing the Skin
A professor by the name of M. Weber created a death test so revered he won 5,000 French Francs for his work. Professor Weber argued that a corpse should have a patch of skin vigorously scrubbed with a brush a few hours after death. If the skin looked irritated, the person wasn’t dead. If the skin took on a parchment-like appearance, then they were confirmed to be deceased. One imagines it must have been far easier to be a scientist in an era where brushing a corpse awarded you with a lavish lifestyle and academic esteem.
Commoners and barber-surgeons used a more practical, yet irritating, version of the test: rubbing the skin with annoying or thorned weeds. Anyone who has encountered stinging nettle would agree that the plant likely would raise a person from the dead, especially if rubbed all over the chest or back. The reasoning behind this layman’s test was similar to Professor Weber’s. If the skin on a body responded to the application of an irritating plant, it would stand to reason that the nervous and circulatory systems were still working in some way. It was also possible that the irritation would raise someone out of a stupor.