[Medico-legal studies on the deaths from coal-mine accidents. 1. Cadaveric phenomena (author's transl)].

The authors have investigated the cadaveric phenomena on 30 persons killed in coal-mine accidents being kept in pits for a long time after death. The conclusions are as follows: The appearance and progress of cadaveric phenomena in pits depend on the postmortem interval alone, not on the immediate causes of death which have been found to be of seven classes in coal-mine accidents. The phenomena on cadavers kept in pits are the same as those in the air of normal temperature on earth. The reason may be that there are both accelerative factors and suppressive factors among various environmental factors in pits after occurrence of accident and they offset each other to make no difference between cadavers in pits and those on earth.