4. Burning the Skin
Burning the skin was used in numerous ways to test for the presence of actual death. In the most popular form, scalding water was dumped on part of the presumed deceased’s body. The belief was that the shock of boiling water would be so hot it would surely wake someone out of a non-lethal stupor. Other doctors burned the tip of the nose with the similar goal of shocking the presumed decease out of a coma-like state, if possible.
An English scientist by the name of the Barnett took a more scientific approach to burning and determined that if the skin didn’t blister when exposed to heat, the person was indeed dead. Barnett’s method involved using scalding water on the skin of the presumed corpse’s arm. No blistering was a sure sign of no life. It isn’t clear what he said one should do if the arm blistered but the presumed deceased still didn’t wake up. One also wonders how this method squared with the knowledge that bodies could burn, which was doubtless known due to house fires, burning of witches and heretics, and so on. Blistering is also a part of the natural decomposition process, which certainly could have complicated Barnett’s methodology.