§ 262. The advantages derivable to the public at large have already been specified, in the removal of causes of pain to the feelings of the living connected with the common burial places; they would also gain in the several measures for protection against the causes of disease specified as within the province of an officer of the public health to remove; and they would also gain in the steps towards the creation of a science of the prevention of disease, and in a better registration of the fact and the causes of death.
To use the words of a great Christian writer,—that all this, which constitutes the last office of the living, “to compose the body to burial,” should be done, and that it should be done well and “gravely, decently, and charitably, we have the example of all civilized nations to engage us, and of all ages of the world to warrant:—so that it is against common honesty, and public fame and reputation not to do this office.”
I would, in conclusion, beg leave to repeat and represent urgently that Her Majesty’s Government, should only set hands to this great work, when invested with full powers to effect it completely: for at present there appears to be no alternative between doing it well or ill; between simply shifting the evil from the centre of the populous districts to the suburbs, and deteriorating them; fixing the sites of interments at inconvenient distances, forming numerous, separate, and weak, and yet enormously expensive, establishments; aggravating the expense, and physical and moral evils of the delay of interment; diminishing the solemnities of sepulture; scattering away the elements of moral and religious improvement, and increasing the duration and sum of the existing evils:—there appears to be no distinct or practicable alternative between these results and effecting such a change as, if zealously carried out, will soothe and elevate the feelings of the great bulk of the population, abate the apprehensions of the dying, influence the voluntary adoption of beneficial changes in the practice of obsequies, occasion an earlier removal of the dead from amidst the living to await interment and ensure the impressiveness of the funeral service, give additional securities against attempts on life, and trustworthy evidence of the fact of death, with the means of advancing the protection of the living against the attacks of disease; and at a reduced expense provide in well arranged national cemeteries places for public monuments, becoming the position of the empire amongst civilized nations.
I have the honour to be, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
Edwin Chadwick.
[1]. According to a memoir on this subject, read at the Royal Academy of Sciences, by M. Cadet de Vaux, in the year 1781, “Le méphetisme qui s’etoit dégagé d’une des fosses voisines du cimetière, avoit infecté toutes les caves: on comparait aux poisons les plus subtils, à ceux dont les sauvages imprégnant leur flèches meurtrières, la terrible activité de cette émanation. Les murs baignés de l’humidité dont elles les pénétroit, pouvoit communiquer, disoit on par le seul attouchement les accidens les plus redoutable.” See Mémoires de la Société Royale de Médecine, tom. viii. p. 242; also Annales de Chimie, tom. v. p. 158. As an instance of the state of the cellars around the grave-yard, it is stated, that a workman being engaged in one of them put his hand on the wet wall. He was warned that the moisture on the walls was poisonous, and was requested to wash the hand in vinegar. He merely dried his hand on his apron: at the end of three days the whole arm became numb, then the hand and lower arm swelled with great pain, blisters came out on the skin, and the epidermis came off.
[2]. Vide also, Traité des Maladies des Artisans par Patissier, d’après Ramazzini, 8vo. Paris, 1822, p. 151, sur les Fossoyeurs: “Le sort des fossoyeurs est très déplorable, leur face est livide, leur aspect triste: je n’en ai vu aucun devenir vieux.” Also pp. 108–9, 137, 144.
[3]. Manuel du Tanneur et Corroyeur. Paris, 1833, p. 325.