§ 98. The practical means for the accomplishment of such an alteration of custom in the mode of keeping the remains of the deceased, preparatory to interment, in the towns of England, may be further considered in connexion with the remedial measures, for the reduction of the great and unnecessary expense of funerals.
Mr. Hewitt states the practical need of some such accommodation of survivors for the temporary reception of the dead in the crowded districts, independently of the high considerations on which the intermediate houses of reception at Franckfort and Munich and other parts of Germany were established.
The house in which my foreman lives is seldom unoccupied by a corpse. During the last week there were three at one time. The poor people speak of the inconvenience of having the corpse in their house, where they have only one room for their family. It is customary for me to say, “Very well, then, you may be accommodated; the body may be brought to our house, and kept until the time of the funeral, when you and your friends may come to the house and put on your fittings and follow the body to the ground.” This is done: men and women come to the house, put on hoods, scarves, coats, and hatbands, and follow the body to the ground. The body is sometimes removed under these circumstances from the room of the private house where the death has taken place, but it is most frequently done when the death of a poor person has occurred in an hospital, a workhouse, or a prison, and it is wished to bury them respectably, but where it would be inconvenient to remove them to the only room which the family have to live in. I believe that all the undertakers receive deceased persons in their houses and keep them for burial.
Judging from the particular instances coming within your own experience, do you believe that if arrangements of a superior order were made for the reception of bodies and keeping them under medical care previous to interment, the accommodation would be deemed a boon?—Yes; it would be a boon to a great many classes, especially the poorest. It would be a great accommodation also to many persons of the middle classes—shopkeepers, who only keep the under part of their houses and let off the upper parts. On the occurrence of a death these classes are as much inconvenienced by the presence of a corpse as are persons of the labouring classes. And yet there are few who like to have a burial take place in less time than a week. To such persons as these it would certainly be a very great accommodation to have an intermediate house of reception for the due care of the body until the proper time of interment.
Mr. Thomas Tagg, jun., an undertaker of extensive business in the city of London, states, that “besides the poorest classes who die at hospitals and are buried by their friends, and are sometimes taken to the undertaker’s premises, when more convenient to the relatives of the deceased than to be removed to their own houses, that respectable persons also from the country, who die at an hotel or inn, or in apartments, are occasionally removed to the undertaker’s until the coffins are made, and they can be conveyed to the residence of their family, or their vaults in the country.”
§ 99. Mr. Wild gives other examples of the practice; and states that instances sometimes occur of persons of respectable condition in life who cannot bear the painful impressions produced by the long continued presence of the corpse in the house, and who quit it, and return to attend the funeral.
§ 100. Mr. P. H. Holland, surgeon and registrar of Chorlton-on-Medlock, in Manchester, states an instance where a mother who had lost two of her children from small-pox (as she conceived, from the retention in the house of the corpse of a child belonging to another woman which had also died of the small-pox) stated that it would be a great boon to the poorer classes to provide proper places to receive bodies until the convenient time of interment. The extent of benefit which such a provision would confer, and which is attested by other witnesses of extensive experience, will indeed be sufficiently manifest on consideration of the circumstances under which they are placed.
§ 101. It is only submitted that suitable accommodation should be provided for the removal and care of bodies, and given, as it would be, as a boon. Confident statements are frequently made that the removal of the deceased from private houses to any public place of reception would be resisted; but it appears on an examination of the cases in which resistance was made, that in most of them the arrangements were really offensive, coarse-minded, and vulgar, and such as to prove that the feelings of the relations and survivors were little cared for by those who ought to have understood and consulted them. In some cases of the lowest paupers the retention of the body has been proved to have arisen from a desire to raise money, on the pretext of applying it to defray the expenses of the funeral long after it had been provided for; but the objection of the respectable portions of the labouring classes are objections not to the removal itself, but to the mode and sort of place in which it is commonly performed on the occurrence of a death from contagious disease, in a bare parish shell, by pauper bearers, to the “bone-house” or other customary receptacle for suicides, deserted or relationless, or, as they are sometimes termed, “God-forsaken people.” On the occurrence of the cholera little difficulty was interposed by any class to the immediate removal of the dead. The success of such a measure would depend entirely on the mode in which it is conducted.
§ 102. In reference to all such alterations, it may here be premised that very serious practical errors are frequently created by taking particular manifestations of feeling or prejudice, and assuming those prejudices to be impregnable, and assuming, moreover, that any or every prejudice pervades the entire population.
Not only does the extent of the prejudices which are supposed to stand in the way of regulations of the practice of interments, but the difficulties of overcoming them, appear, from an examination of the evidence, to be commonly much exaggerated; but it appears that the nature of the objections themselves is much mistaken: it appears, for example, that the prejudice against dissection often arises less from a desire to preserve the remains in their living form than to preserve them from profanation and disrespect. In no part of the country has a more intense feeling been manifested to preserve the remains of the dead from dissection than in Scotland, where the expense of safes made of iron bars, strongly riveted down, and of a watchman to watch it, forms a prominent item of the funeral charges. Yet when the studies of the schools of anatomy were allowed to depend chiefly on the supplies of subjects stolen from the graves, it is stated by practitioners who, whilst students, were themselves driven to that mode of procuring subjects, that their labours were frequently frustrated by the precautions the survivors had taken to render the use of the remains for dissection impossible, by putting quick lime into the coffin to destroy them. The same precaution has been known to have been sometimes taken for the same purpose in London; and yet by proper care and attention to the feelings of the survivors, the practice of post-mortem examinations has been extended, and the consent to the use of the remains even for dissection in the schools has been frequently obtained from the survivors. A witness of peculiar and extensive opportunities of experience in several thousand cases was asked on this point—