&c., &c., &c.
Sir,
In compliance with the request which I have had the honour to receive from you, that I would examine the evidence on the practice of interment, and the means of its improvement, and prepare for consideration a Report thereon, I now submit the facts and conclusions following:—
It has been remarked, as a defect in the General Report on the evidence as to the sanitary condition of the labouring population, that it did not comprise any examination of the evidence as to the effects produced on the public health, by the practice of interring the dead amidst the habitations of the town population. I wish here to explain that the omission arose from the subject being too great in its extent, and too special in its nature, to allow of the completion at that time, of any satisfactory investigation in relation to it even if it had not then been under examination by a Committee of the House of Commons, whose Report is now before the public.
To obtain the information on which the following report is founded, I have consulted, as extensively as the time allowed and my opportunities would permit, ministers of religion who are called upon to perform funereal rites in the poorer districts: I have made inquiries of persons of the labouring classes, and of secretaries and officers of benefit societies and burial clubs, in the metropolis and in several provincial towns in the United Kingdom, on the practice of interments in relation to those classes, and on the alterations and improvements that would be most in accordance with their feelings: I have questioned persons following the occupation of undertaker, and more especially those who are chiefly engaged in the interment of the dead of the labouring classes, on the improvements which they deem practicable in the modes of performing that service: I have consulted foreigners resident in the metropolis, on the various modes of interment in their own countries: I have examined the chief administrative regulations thereon in Germany, France, and the United States: and I have consulted several eminent physiologists as to the effects produced on the health of the living, by emanations from human remains in a state of decomposition. I need scarcely premise that the moral as well as the physical facts developed in the course of this inquiry are often exceedingly loathsome; but general conclusions can only be distinctly made out from the various classes of particular facts, and the object being the suggestion of remedies and preventives, it were obviously as unbecoming to yield to disgusts or to evade the examination and calm consideration of those facts, as it would be in the physician or the surgeon, in the performance of his duty with the like object, to shrink from the investigation of the most offensive manifestations of disease.
§ 1. It appears that the necessity of removing interments from the midst of towns is very generally admitted on various considerations, independently of those founded on the presumed injurious effects arising from the practice to the public health. I believe an alteration of the practice is strongly desired by many clergymen of the established church, whose incomes, even with the probable compensation for the loss of burial dues, might be expected to be diminished by the discontinuance of intra-mural interments. Exemptions from a general prohibition of such interments are, however, claimed in favour of particular burial-grounds, situate within populous districts, of which grounds it is stated that they are not over-crowded with bodies, and of which it is further alleged that they have not been known, and cannot be proved, to be injurious to the public health.
The statements as to the innocuousness of particular graveyards are supported by reference to the general testimony of a number of medical witnesses of high professional position, by whom it is alleged that the emanations from decomposing human remains do not produce specific disease, and, further, that they are not generally injurious. The practical consequences of these doctrines extend beyond the present question, and are so important in their effects on the sanitary economy of all towns, as apparently to require that no opportunity should be lost of examining the statements of facts on which they are founded.
The medical evidence of this class has generally been given in answer to complaints made by the public, of the offensiveness, and the danger to health which arises from the practice of dissection in schools of anatomy amidst crowded populations. The chief fact alleged to prove the innocuousness of emanations from the dead is that professors of anatomy experience no injury from them. Thus, Dr. Warren, of Boston, in a paper cited by M. Parent Duchâtelet, states, that he has been accustomed all his life to dissecting-rooms, in which he has been engaged night and day. “It has sometimes happened to me,” he observes, “after having dissected bodies in a state of putrefaction, to have experienced a sort of weakness and the loss of appetite; but the phenomena were never otherwise than transient. During the year 1829, the weather being excessively hot, decomposition advanced with a degree of rapidity such as I have rarely witnessed: at that season the emanations became so irritating, that they paralyzed the hands, producing small pustules and an excessive itching, and yet my general health was in nowise affected.”
Again, whilst it is stated by M. Duchâtelet that students who attend the dissecting-rooms are sometimes seriously injured, and even killed by pricks and cuts with the instruments of dissection, yet it is denied that they are subject to any illness from the emanations from the remains “other than a nausea and a dysentery for two or three days at the commencement of their studies.” Fevers the students of medicine are confessedly liable to, but he says it is only when they are in attendance on the living patients in the fever wards.