HPB-SB-4-27: Difference between revisions

Sir Henry Thompson, reinforced by somewhat less than a thousand medical and statistical authorities, proved the fearful consequences to the health of certain communities of the injudicious management and occasional digging-up of graveyards. Ten years ago, in 318 acres inside the city of London, 1,500,000 persons were buried. The death-rate near the cemeteries comprising those acres was much larger than elsewhere. There is no doubt that emanations from burial-ground are noxious. Dr. Walker stated in the ''Journal of Public Health'' that a single inspiration of the product of human putrefaction has in numberless instances destroyed life, and that it has in other instances induced consumption, typhoid and scarlet fevers. From a single coffin unadvisedly opened in Dijon in 1773 there was emitted such an effluvia; that of 170 рersons present 140 were seized with a putrid and malignant disease, which assumed an epidemic character throughout the city. In New Orleans, after visitations of yellow fever, recurrent effects have been distinctly traced to the burial-places of the victims. Local epidemics where graveyards are disturbed, poisoning from wells sunk near graveyards-these and kindred effects resulting from the present method of interment have been, it is fair to say, distinctly proven.

The methods of disposing of the dead, adopted in the past were many. They often included burning. Egypt had its corpses embalmed and preserved in coffins of imperishable wood. Stored in the cities they bred a pestilence. The Egyptians built the Pyramids upon the plains, and there at least the blackened, shrivelled bodies of their ancestors found a long rest wich the curiocity of decent ages prevented from being eternal. No museum is now complete without it’s mummy. Ethiopia, like Egypt, believed that the spirit of the dead would always inhabit the body. The Ethiopians undertook, therefore, to preserve their corpses carefully, but upon another plan-they inclosed them in columns of glass, placing them upright like statues. The Hebrews and the Assyrians interred their dead after embalming them ; though Saul and his three sons were burned, and Asa was burned with extraordinary pomp. Cremation was always adopted by the ancient Jews when they wished te<ref>So in text.</ref> render extraordinary distinction to the fallen. The Massaget*<ref>No footnote found</ref>–killed their old men and ate them, on the plea that they would enjoy their youth again in the the veins of their descendants. The Hindoo surrounded the dead with all fancies his poetical religion gave birth to. Fire, the principle of life, embraced the body, released to the winds the matters composing it, which, borne back to the elements from which they came, were united to the god the dead adored. On the contrary the Persians refused either to burn or bury. For them the sacred fire must not be polluted by touch of corpse, nor must the earth, be soiled, by its contact. Their dead were inclosed in wax and deposited in wild places or on high mountains, where they might be eaten and carried away by carrion. The Greeks at first burned or buried, indifferently. Devotion to the memory of their ancestors, which lay at the bottom of their religion, demanded the care and finally the preservation in some form of their remains. With the Greeks the rite of burning was solemn and beautiful. It may be well at this time for the advecates of cremation to take into account the difference not only between the empressive spectacle of the burning of Patroclus and the scientitic roasting of the Baron de Palm, but between the poetical anscients who sanctioned the former proceeding and the cold conservative Anglo-Saxons who will shudder at the latter one. Says Homer (translated Mr. Bryant) of the funeral of Patroclus :