There seems to be some sort of drug that’s semi-prevalent in crime fiction (or mystery in general) of a drug one can take to make them appear to be dead. There are some that are pretty fantastic, but I’m curious about the general premise.
Are there any drugs or herbs that, if taken, could fool a reasonably competent person (i.e. knows how to check pulse and breathing etc reliably) into thinking the user is dead? Any that could fool trained medical professionals with no equipment?
We’ll specify that you should have at least a good (>50%) chance of actually waking up from it eventually without any major damage (especially brain damage). It also needs to be able to be administered easily, i.e. you don’t need an IV and a trained anesthesiologist to make it work. It doesn’t have to be a pill, but it should be usable “in the field.”
I suspect if such a thing even exists at all, it’s probably fairly unreliable, but I’m curious.
Tetrodotoxin - it is very toxic, but sublethal doses can leave the victim in a near-death state for days, while still conscious. But I am pretty sure the line between a near-death state and a really dead state is pretty slim, and not something to be experimented with.
What about a low dose of curare or similar family of drugs? I believe the low respiration and heart rate through muscle relaxation could be used to fake death. But as with tetrodotoxin, I think the line of ‘close to death’ such that the pulse rate is slow enough and respiration shallow enough to be confused for dead is a very thin one. After all, the brain needs some minimal amount of oxygenated blood before brain damage or real death occurs after a fairly short period of time.
It’s a convenient plot device, so it’s likely made up. Authors and playwrights have likely been using the concept for hundreds of years.
Presumably it would reduce metabolism, pulse, breathing, body temperature etc. to the point where a cursory check would not find life. At least, that’s the story… it’s more believeable if you don’t get into details.
I put this in the same category as the non-injurious head bash that knocks someone out cold for an entire movie scene, or the knockout gas that can be sprayed in a room or onto someone’s face and they drop unconscious like a rag doll - all fictions.
Ever watch the movie, The Serpent and the Rainbow? The witch doctors use to supposedly bring the dead back as zombies after being buried alive. I think the drug was textrodotoxin which is what si_blakely mentioned earlier.
While it is difficult to identify a drug which could be used with any reliability to fake death (that fools a reasonably competent doctor), it is also true that there have been many well-attested cases of people who have woken up in a morgue, having collapsed and been adjudged deceased (sometimes by paramedics/EMTs at the scene).
In these cases, you would expect (at the least) no discernible heartbeat/respiration, and fixed pupillary response. However, these events appear to incur no lasting physical trauma, including neurological damage from hypoxia (the psychological trauma of waking up in a morgue probably cannot be underestimated, though).
The additional life-preserving capacity of hypothermia could also be harnessed - people with extreme hypothermia have been revived when no survival appears impossible (including extended periods under water).
So there may be possibilities that do not tread the fine line between death and life, but (due to ethics committees) research to determine these cases is unlikely.
The reason anaesthetists get paid the big bickies is because the drugs they use are potentially very dangerous - the line between a pain free dreamless sleep from which you wake up and one from which you don’t is pretty skinny, which is why in every operation there is a specialist present whose sole job is to keep an eye on surfing the fine line. If there were even a remotely safe way for an amateur to do this and reliably recover, heart surgery would have been invented long before it was.
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”
200 year old spoiler alert?
Actually, IIRC the count tunneled into his neighbour’s cell. When the neighbour dies, he waits for the body to be shrouded then sneaks in to do a switcheroo; the guards return to grab the wrapped body then he gets tossed into the sea and escapes. No fancy drugs, just remember not to sneeze.
In earlier times, when even the concept of “taking a pulse” was not well understood and death was diagnosed by whether a person had “given up the ghost” (emitted the “death rattle” sound of a typical last breath), such mistakes were even more common. This is said to be why the word “wake” is used for the party held with the dead body on hand: a chance to see if the supposedly dead would wake up.
Going back even further in time, there is a famous case of a crucifixion victim who was taken down and buried after a few hours (usually crucifixion took days to kill) because he appeared to be quite dead, but reportedly he was up and about again a couple days later. People still gossip about it.