Steve Reads

Warning: gross discussions of corpses, and the handling thereof, ahead.

It’s good that Paul Barber can take his vampire studies with a bit of humor; I’d be sad if he had forgotten the comical roots of what became a very serious scholarly study of attitudes toward death. Hence in the middle of a very long and interesting section on what, specifically, happens to bodies after death, we have the footnote on page 163 that begins, “While we are dwelling on the unutterably loathsome . . . ” and this one on 176:

That the mouth of the corpse was open and the face red would be quite normal. The stake would presumably rebound because of the elasticity of the (bloated) body cavity. Also, it should not surprise us, by now, that a body moves when it is struck and bleeds when it is cut. I would guess that Giure Grando’s cry resulted from the manipulation of the corpse but can really not say much about the matter, since I almost never have occasion to decapitate a corpse with a shovel.

The process of decomposition is endlessly fascinating — something I realized vaguely, but not really in detail until I read Barber’s book. For instance, it hadn’t occurred to me that dumping a body in the water — even with a good bit of weight — is often not enough to keep it down; bacteria in the intestines produce a great quantity of methane, which often make the body swell to twice or three times its living volume and float to the surface. Hence if you really want to kill someone and dump his body in the water, you should slice open his stomach and intestines before you dump it; the gases will escape before they have time to puff up the body.

Barber’s introduction suggests that physiological details such as these — fun as they are — weren’t part of his original plan. He wanted to track down the roots of beliefs in vampires, which eventually led him to realize that belief in vampires comes from ignorance of disease. When your brother dies and then your sister, it’s reasonable to think that your brother has come back from the dead to haunt your family, and that the corpse has killed your sister. This belief gains some plausibility if your sister has reported seeing visions of your brother in her sleep in the days immediately after his death. All of these facts may be explained in a purely materialistic way, and a lot of the mystery disappears with a good theory of germs.

Looking back on times of plague, especially, a lot of mysteries disappear if you realize how people are buried and why societies treat corpses the way they do. If many people are dying at once, gravediggers don’t have the time to put the corpse six feet underground; they rush, and the body returns to the surface — maybe because there was a flood, or because the body’s natural bloating pushes the dirt away. It may well seem, then, that the body has “come back to life.” Driving a stake into it can, indeed, solve a lot of problems — bloating in particular. Burning the body is a decisive solution, but it’s also very expensive; one of the more interesting nuggets in Barber’s book is about the difficulty of burning a human body, especially on the scale needed during plague epidemics.

Vampires, Burial and Death rests on many such nuggets — various facts about decomposition and the preparation of corpses. They’re incredibly interesting, and have made me want to go read Coroner (which Barber cites), so long as it’s something more than a potboiler.

Unfortunately, those nuggets don’t hold together for a non-scholarly reader. The quantity of evidence amassed is quite impressive, and builds a convincing story. But it is repetitive in the extreme. I’m sure it contains no more mass than a death-studies scholar would demand, but for the general reader it could profitably lose 50% or 75% of its heft.