Chapter LVIII, Section 1b

And this is often found, that in times of pestilence many that are carried for dead to the graves to be buried, revive again. The same also hath often befell women by reason of fits of the mother. And Rabbit Moises, out of the book of Galen, which Patriarcha translated, makes mention of a man who was suffocated for six days, and did neither eat nor drink, and his arteries became hard. And it is said, in the same book, that a certain man, being filled with water, lost the pulse of his whole body, so that the heart was not perceived to move, and he lay like a dead man. It is also said that a man, by reason of a fall from a high place, or great noise, or long staying under the water, may fall into a swoon, which may continue forty-eight hours, and so may lay as if he were dead, his face being very green. And in the same place there is mention made of a man that buried a man, who seemed to be dead, seventy-two hours after his seeming decease, and so killed him because he buried him alive; and there are given signs whereby it may be known who are alive, although they seem to be dead, and, indeed, will die, unless there be some means to recover them, as phlebotomy, or some other cure. And these are such as very seldom happen. This is the manner by which we understand magicians and physicians do raise dead men to life, as they that were tried by the stinging of serpents, were, by the nation of the Marsi and the Psilli, restored to life. We may conceive that such kind of extasies may continue a long time, although a man be not truly dead, as it is in dormice and crocodiles and many other serpents, which sleep all winter, and are in such a dead sleep that they can scarce be awakened with fire. And I have often seen a dormouse dissected and continue immovable, as if she were dead, until she was boiled, and when put into boiling water the dissected members did show life. And, although it be hard to be believed, we read in some approved historians, that some men have slept for many years together; and, in the time of sleep until they awaked, there was no alteration in them so as to make them seem older. The same doth Pliny testify of a certain boy, whom, he saith, being wearied with heat and his journey, slept fifty-seven years in a cave. We read, also, that Epimenides Gnosius slept fifty-seven years in a cave. Hence the proverb arose—to outsleep Epimenides. M. Damascenus tells that in his time a certain countryman in Germany, being wearied, slept for the space of a whole autumn and the winter following, under a heap of hay, until the summer, when the hay began to be eaten up; then he was found awakened as a man half dead and out of his wits. Ecclesiastical histories confirm this opinion concerning the seven sleepers, whom they say slept 196 years. There was in Norvegia a cave in a high sea shore, where, as Paulus Diaconus and Methodius, the martyr, write, seven men lay sleeping a long time without corruption, and the people that went in to disturb them were contracted or drawn together, so that after a while, being forewarned by that punishment, they dared not disturb them. Xenocrates, a man of no mean repute amongst philosophers, was of the opinion that this long sleeping was appointed by God as a punishment for some certain sins.