2. Cutting Off a Finger
One cannot imagine a more dispiriting event: you are in a coma in the 18th century, and no one knows how to rouse you. So, they cut off your finger. You miraculously can wake from your coma. Now, you are still likely to die to the poor medical treatment of the time, but you’re also missing a finger. Given the lack of antibiotics in the 18th and 19th century, it’s also entirely possible that even if you weren’t dead before, you would quickly succumb to sepsis thanks to bacteria entering your bloodstream through a severed finger. Talk about adding insult to (a likely fatal) injury.
Sadly, this test wasn’t even grounded in particularly good science. Practitioners weren’t looking for a slowed, coagulated, or even a lack of blood streaming from the wound. No, they were keeping their fingers crossed that the shock of having a finger chopped off would jolt the presumed deceased back to life. While other finger tests, like holding a finger above a candle, did look for signs of circulation, the finger-chopping test was an extremely simple and brutal method.