Medical knowledge of the precise physiological markers of irreversible death was limited.

The tools for verifying death with confidence were not universally available or used.

And the consequences of being wrong were as terrible as the most Gothic imagination could conceive.

The response to this fear, in the nineteenth century, was both institutional and technological.

Medical examiners and certification requirements for death became more formalized.

“Safety coffins” were patented and occasionally sold — coffins equipped with bells, air tubes, or other mechanisms designed to allow a prematurely buried person to signal for help.

Waiting mortuaries — facilities where bodies were kept for a period before burial to allow the natural processes of decomposition to begin, providing unambiguous evidence of actual death — were established in some European cities.