Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial

"'Though costly flowers are scattered on tombs and large sums spent on monuments, it rarely happens that a penny is spent to make sure that the subject of the ostentatious display is really dead." The speaker was Mr William Tebb, F.R.G.S, who presided at a meeting of the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. Here are some of Mr Tebb's warning statements: Dr. Franz Hartmann, a German physician, had personally investigated 700 cases of premature burial. Professor Huxley had declared that it was extremely difficult to detect the true signs of death. The Home Secretary had stated that in five years there had been no fever that 53,000 cases of death certificates being signed without any cause of death being stated."

-Poverty Bay Herald, March 10 1905.