We know from Cecil’s column on the subject that zombification with tetrodotoxin is a dubious idea at best. However, the idea of a drug that allows the user to feign death is common in many fictional sources. Supposedly, the drug suspends heartbeat and breathing to the point that even a physician cannot reliably tell you are not dead. After the drug wears off or the antidote is administered, the subject “wakes up” seemingly no worse for wear.
Does anything even remotely like this exist in the real world? Even if it does, I cannot imagine that the subject would be no worse for wear.
I would love to know, because it would help me understand this:
During WWII, my then-teenaged grandfather and his sister (my great-aunt) tried to flee Nazi-occupied Poland through Czechoslovakia to as-yet-not-Nazified territory. They were caught by Czech border guards and put in a work camp. At the camp, my grandfather made a point of helping around in the infirmary, assisting the doctor with whatever menial tasks he had. When the Nazis came through to take all the Jews away (presumably to shoot them or put them in concentration camps), the doctor gave my grandfather and great-aunt a drug to make them look as though they were dead, and told the Germans not to bother with those two - they’d killed themselves when they heard the Nazis were coming. After the Nazis left, the doctor revived them.
My great-aunt is still alive and very with it, and although she’s one of the least linear storytellers you’ve ever met, she’s not particularly prone to making up fantastic tales like this one. Presumably, the Nazis didn’t listen to their heartbeats, although they might have poked/prodded at the ‘bodies.’ What could the work camp doctor have given them?
It happens from time to time that people have been pronounced dead after eating pufferfish, only to wake up days later. The pufferfish makes tetrodotoxin as a defense mechanism.
Antidote and adrenaline on top of an overdose would conceal that a person is alive for a period of time, unless they are properly examined of course.
Imagine being a relative of a person who died from eating pufferfish, to then find out that another person had woken up in the morgue days later. What if their relative had woken up even later than that?
The rough agreement seemed to be that if such a drug existed and was reliable (meaning you could take it without being in significant danger of not waking up) then we wouldn’t need anesthesiologists.
Any drug suspending a heartbeat or respiration will kill a warm patient.
Any number of chemical agents might fool a casual observer into thinking a patient is dead by quieting skeletal muscle. Cases where individuals were thought to be dead and later found not to be dead represent incompetence at diagnosing death, usually in situations where the pulse and respirations are weak and soft.
Hypothermia is the closest thing you can get to make someone look pretty dead even to an expert observer, and it has to be very controlled to actually work reliably. You can’t just toss someone in a freezer. Attendant arrhythmias can easily finish a person off, and getting them too cold will cause irreversible cell damage. Having said that, there are cases where cold people turned out to be reasonably alive upon warming. Controlled hypothermia accompanying clinical anesthesia for surgery is useful in certain situations; those folks could easily be mistaken for dead were it not for the fact that there are doctors messing around with them as if they were not.
In the scenario described by GilaB, wouldn’t any anesthetic or drug that would knock them out, do, along with a statement like “Those two kids over there? They just offed themselves.”? There’s no reason to assume that Nazis rounding up people would check for vital signs.
It isn’t because the kids were told “This will make you appear dead” that they were actually given some exotic substance, whose availability in a work camp during WWII seems highly unlikely, even assuming that it exists in the first place.