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In the second half of the eighteenth century, the social and medical way of considering an apparently dead newborn changed. The parental expectation exceeded the mere hope of seeing the child show signs of life enough to be baptized, and death at birth became more and more unbearable. This social expectation towards apparent death was completed by a scientific redefinition of death as a gradual process. The medical literature (1760?1900) shows the growing role of doctors and midwives alongside these newborns, the progressive understanding of the apparent death's etiology, and therapeutic experiments conducted throughout this century and a half.