International: Baby from Grave

One freezing morning last January a 23-year-old unmarried girl in Newark, N. J. told her mother she had cramps, locked herself in her room, and unattended, gave birth to a 5-lb. baby. While in labor the girl screamed so loudly that her father heard. He broke in her bedroom door. Believing that the baby was dead and to avoid family disgrace, he picked it up, went outside, dug a foot-deep hole in the frozen earth, placed the naked infant in the grave, covered it with dirt.

Forty-five minutes later Dr. Carmine Gerade Berardinelli arrived to attend the young woman who, he had been told, had had a miscarriage. Dr. Berardinelli, insistent upon seeing the fetus, went out with the father who dug it up carelessly with a spade.

“I was astonished,” wrote Dr. Berardinelli in the September American Journal of Surgery, “to see a baby, not quite full term. . . . Though the face was covered with dirt, I found no dirt in the mouth or the nostrils. On holding the infant up in the cold air, it started to cry feebly, moving both the arms and the legs. I rushed into the house with the baby, calling for hot water and warm blankets. In the kitchen, I tied the cord, placed the baby in a warm, bath and cleaned off the brown dirt clinging to the body. In the meantime, the child began to cry louder and artificial respiration was unnecessary. I then placed the baby in warm blankets. . . . I have been called upon to attend the child only three times for slight colds.”

Dr. Berardinelli, who is assistant medical examiner of Essex County, N. J., commented: “It is distinctly uncommon in this country to bury infants alive. The case herein reported is one of the few instances in which the child is alive and perfectly healthy months after being buried alive.”