Best Google n-gram yet: how thinking about death changed in 1767

I'm sure Google Ngrams needs no introduction, but in case I'm wrong: it's a nifty (if crude and much-misused) tool for investigating the frequency of written terms in Google's vast databank of digitised books - some trillion or so words.

As I was editing my forthcoming zombies book, I fiddled about with Google NGrams to visualise the emergence of certain technologies (such as the sharp rise and fall of galvanism).

One of the central questions in my book is the notion of death, and how it is better understood as a process than a state - i.e. whether you are 'dead' or not depends largely on what medical technology is lying to hand. The longer you are in cardiac arrest (heart not beating) or respiratory arrest (not breathing) the harder it is to revive you, but you're not dead until the doctors decide nothing else can be done.

However, it wasn't always this way. There was a time when both of the symptoms above indicated the cessation of life. In fact, when early reports of successful mouth-to-mouth were presented to the Royal Society, their prickly response was: "Life ends when breathing ceases." You were either dead or you weren't.

And that's what makes the idea of "apparent death" so interesting.

The first thing to notice is that prior to 1773, there is no record of the phrase "apparent death". You were either dead or alive. There was no inbetween. But something happened in 1767 that was already starting to take effect: the founding of a society in Holland which aimed to recover victims of drowning. Reports of successful resuscitations led to similar humane societies appearing in Milan, Venice, Paris, Hamburg, and in London in 1774 the Society for the Preservation of Persons Apparently Drowned or Dead was established. This coincides exactly with the start of the steep rise in the ngram.

The sharp peak seems to correlate with the publication of what might be the first manual on resuscitation. The chart continues on for some time and drops away as "apparent death" is supplanted by more precise terms such as "cardiac arrest" and "respiratory arrest".

Thanks to science's often unique terminology and jargon, Google Ngrams is a wonderful way to track the inception of new technologies and their rise to prominence. But this is a fantastic example of a sudden, seismic shift in a concept. It shows how people thought about life and death, and how death suddenly shifted from an absolute term to a relative one almost overnight. It marks the birth of resuscitative medicine, and the huge cognitive leap that was made in realising that it may be possible to save people who showed no outward sign of life. Lateat scintillula forsan!

Obviously this isn't a perfect tool or a perfect example, but it is a startling one. Can you find any similar shifts in thinking as evidenced by an Ngram? I'd love to see more!