Old Print Article: “A Woman Returns To Life While On A Dissecting Table,” New York Times (1884)

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“While on the table the body showed signs of life.”

No one in a Massachusetts insane asylum was going to believe the story of Estelle Newman. They would just assume she was crazy. An article about her predicament from the December 11, 1884 New York Times:

Springfield, Mass.–A strange story has come from Egremont, among the Berkshire hills, near the New-York line. The town and the surrounding villages are in great excitement. The story runs that Estelle Newman, about 30 years old, died in Egremont in 1878, and, after the funeral services in the little Methodist church was buried in the town cemetery and forgotten. The sensation comes from the dying testimony of H. Worth Wright, in Connecticut, who is said to have confessed to his brother that he, being a student in the Albany Medical College, was present at the funeral with other students, lay in wait near the cemetery till the burial was over and graveyard was deserted, and then helped disinter the body and carry it in a sack to the medical college. They at once went to work on it in a dissecting room. While on the table the body showed signs of life, and was resuscitated by the students. Finding the woman alive on their hands the authorities of the college had her taken to an insane asylum in Schoharie County, N.Y. This is the last that Wright is said to have known of her whereabouts. The Newman woman’s grave will probably be opened to see what the story amounts to.”

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