This cheery little news bit from the BBC reports that persons in at least FIVE British hospitals have been wrongly certified as dead. We’re not talking about Victorian England; one of these cases dates from 1996. I’m tempted to make a series of t-shirts and buttons with the warning “Are you really SURE I’m not dead?” As long as I can market this fear as a real and present threat, I’m sure to make a mint.
I know we have all sorts of things to worry about these days and there are claims made that those things are more important than, say, finding factual verification for premises from Edgar Allan Poe stories. But honestly, isn’t the idea of being mistaken for a dead person, well, at least a rather novel fear?
The BBC Report from 25 May, 2008 about Living People Mistaken for Dead Ones