5. Yanking the Tongue and Nipples
Dr. J. V. Laborde wrote an entire treatise on resuscitating dead people by yanking on their tongues. While, in theory, tugging on a tongue could help clear the airway of a choking person, it isn’t going to do much for someone in a coma beyond being irritating. However, Laborde was so devoted to his method he went on to invent a device specifically for yanking on tongues that he would gladly sell to mortuary workers. He claimed that if a tongue was yanked on with his invention for three hours and the corpse didn’t revive, it was truly dead.
Not to be outdone by mere tongue yanking, Jules Antoine Josat decided that pulling on the nipples was the right way to determine mortality. He invented the lovely sounding pince-mamalon, which means nipple pliers in the much rougher sounding English. Josat’s rather horrifying methodology involved applying clawed clamps (because regular clamps aren’t painful enough) to the deceased’s nipples and repeatedly yanking on them. It is hard to argue with his logic that this would surely wake someone out of a stupor, but his test was widely disputed and ridiculed, even in his own time.