1. Practicing Foot Torture
Early forensic scientists were not content to chop off fingers or electrocute of the recently deceased. One of the most common and widely practiced death tests throughout Europe was foot torture. As bad as it sounds, the actual practice might be even slightly worse than one imagines. Standard techniques used to create pain in the hopes of jolting the recently deceased awake included shoving large needles under the toenails and slicing the sole with razor blades. The belief was that the pain and shock of hurting the extremely sensitive foot was the surest way of bringing someone out of a deep faint or stupor.
The common element of burning found in other tests was also incorporated into the foot tests, including heating the soles of the feet with red hot irons. In many areas, the “foot test” was all that was needed to conclude that a corpse could safely be buried. After reading all of the methods used to determine death in the 18th and 19th centuries, perhaps it was for the best if all of these folks indeed were dead. One likely wouldn’t want to wake up after an overly zealous forensic scientist performed the foot test!
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
“14 Bizarre 18th-Century Methods For Making Sure A Corpse Was Really Dead” Genevieve Carlton, Ranker. n.d.
Zander, Richard M., ed. Death: Beyond Whole-Brain Criteria. New York: Springer Publishing, 1988.
“Smelling salts” Wikipedia contributors. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. January 2019.
“9 Weird and Unreliable Ways to Avoid Burying Someone Alive” Lauren Davis, io9. October 2013.