Lungeflyteprøven

The Lung Float Test is based on a true story, the novel is set in Sachsen – in and around the city of Leipzig – in the 1680s and deals with the trial of Anna Voigt, who was accused of infanticide, a capital offense in the early modern times.  According to the law code of the Holy Roman Empire of 1532, women convicted of infanticide were to face “burial and impalement” or “drowning preceded by teariong with burning pincers.”

October, 1681: The renowned doctor Johannes Schreyer, from the castle town of Zeitz, is ordered by the amtmann of Pegau, Abraham Walther, to investigate a corpse, an infant found buried in the garden of a mansion. The child’s 14 year old mother, clearly guilty of murder, has escaped together with the infant’s grandmother. Sceptical towards the hasty conclusions, Schreyer notices that the body holds several wounds, as if stabbed by a sharp object. But neither the body nor the cloth that the child was wrapped in, shows any blood. If the child was killed after being born, how can it be that there is no blood? 

Schreyer has recently read about an experimental medical test, never being tried in an official case of infanticide. One opens the child’s body, loosens the lungs and place them in a vessel of water. If air has passed through them, they will be spongy and light and will float. If the child has never breathed, they will sink. In this way one can decide whether the child died before or after birth. Schreyer decides to perform the test on the child: They sink. No air has gone through them. The child must have been stillborn. The amtmann is enraged with this “experimental folly”, he says that the girl will lose her head, and says that this will cost Schreyer´s reputation dearly. Doctor Schreyer quickly realises that he experimental nature of the test is a problem. He signs the report without mentioning the lung float test.