Book Reviews 207 Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation by Michael B. Sabom. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. 224 pp. 3 illustrations. ISBN 0060148950. The phenomenon now known as the Near-Death Experience (NDE), and experiences closely related to it, have in fact been known to exist since antiquity, as evidenced by passages from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the writings of the ancient Egyptians, and passages from Plato’s Republic. But in modern times the NDE was established as a phenomenon by and received its name from Raymond Moody, M.D., Ph.D., with the publication of his book Life After Life in 1975. Moody was the first to collect cases of the NDE and establish a pattern among the various reports from NDE experiencers (NDErs). His study, however, was qualitative in design and was found to be unconvincing among most in the medical and academic arenas. To put the study of the NDE on a more quantitative and scientific basis, Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., conducted a psychological study of the NDE, which he published in his book Life at Death in 1980. The results of this study confirmed Moody’s work, especially in terms of the individual phenomena that constitute what are now called the core features of the NDE. Nonetheless, these two works sparked more controversy than anything else, and the scientific and medical communities maintained their skepticism about the NDE, even questioning whether the reports were fabricated or somehow subconsciously suggested by publicity about the phenomenon. Michael Sabom, M.D., was one such person. It was during the same period as Ring’s initial research that Sabom, a cardiologist, began his research into the NDE, yielding his book Recollections of Death in 1982. Sabom had read Moody’s work and was skeptical of Moody’s dualistic interpretation of the data—that the human mind or personality survives the death of the physical body. In Chapter One of his book, Sabom describes the origins of his interest in the NDE. Even though he was a member of a Christian church, he initially greeted Moody’s work with a typical scientific skepticism, an “indoctrinated scientific mind,” as he put it (p. 3). In an effort to demonstrate that the NDE was fictional, Sabom conducted a medical investigation of the NDE at the University of Florida Medical School teaching hospital and later at the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center. Sabom describes his methodology in Chapter One. He and his coworker, Sarah Kreutziger (a psychiatric social worker) eventually assembled a sample consisting of 116 cases. The interview method used was similar to Ring’s methodology and the same types of data were collected. It is important to point out that Sabom’s patients, as Ring’s, did not know that the researchers were interested in the NDE until after the patients had given their initial accounts.