Death and Trance.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 84, 10 January 1885, Page 5

Death and Trance.

A most extraordinary instance of the deathlike appearance of a person while in a trance is told in the " Lancet." About a fortnight ago, a Dr. Canepa, a physician in Genoa, was attacked with cholera, and before remedial measures could take effect, passed rapidly into the Algide stage, and, to all outward seeming, ceased to live. His death was duly announced by the practitioner in attendance, and his family had performed the last offices, pending those of the undertaker, whose arrival they were awaiting in a room adjoining that in which the body of Dr. Canepa, decently covered with a white sheet, was lying. Suddenly the door between the two chambers was seen to open, and the ghastly figure of Dr. Canepa, arrayed in burial vesture, presented itself to the thunderstruck family. In a_ feeble, scarcely audible voice he complained of having been left too long without attendance (six hours, in fact, having elapsed since he was given up and laid out as dead). He was immediately replaced in bed, and every restorative practised on him till a physician could be obtained to perform Pacini's operation of hypodermoclysis. But in vain. The assistance which might have been effective some hour 3 previously arrived too late, and a valuable life was lost to a wide circle, public as well as private, through the premature assumption that death was real while it was only apparent.