Monsieur Patissier reports several deaths due to grave-digging; and Mr. Chadwick asserts that the vocation of a sexton shortens life one-third. Usually grave-diggers are heavy drinkers; they take to drinking to resist the malignant influence of the vapors which arise slowly but surely out of the cemetery soil, and to do away with any “maudlin sentimentality” that may still linger in their hearts, and that might interfere with their horrible work.
On March 1, 1886, Marke Thornton, of Washington, Ga., met with a singular death. His decease resulted from inhaling poisonous gas which seeped through into a grave he was digging by the side of another. The other men at work with him left the grave as soon as they detected the gas, but Thornton, thinking there was no danger in it, remained and died.
The action of cemetery gases on the human body manifests itself in a variety of ways. Sir T. Spencer Wells states that decomposing human remains so pollute earth, air, and water as to diminish the general health and average duration of life.
Dr. Lyon Playfair affirms that the inspiration of graveyard gases does not always cause one form of decay or putrefaction, but that it depends entirely upon the organs attacked. Entering the blood, it produces fever; communicated to the viscera, it gives origin to diarrhœa, and may, Dr. Playfair thinks, even be the source of consumption. When the irrespirable gas enters the respiratory tract, Dr. Southwood Smith claims that it is conveyed into the system through the thin and delicate walls of the air-vesicles of the lungs in the act of respiration. He states that turpentine, for instance, if only inhaled when passing through a room that was recently painted, will exhibit its effects in some of the fluid excretions of the body even more rapidly than if it had been taken into the stomach. Dr. Riecke thinks that putrid emanations operate also through the olfactory nerves by powerful, penetrating, and offensive smells.
Cemeteries are breeding grounds as well as foci of disease and death.
THE CREMATORIUM AT WOKING, ENGLAND.
Mr. Chadwick, in his “Report on the Practice of Interment in Towns” (London, 1843), writes:—
“The injurious effects of exhalations from the decomposition in question on the health and life of man is proved by a sufficient number of trustworthy facts. The injurious influence is manifest in proportion to the concentration of the emanations. Sometimes it produces asphyxia and sudden death. In a less concentrated state the emanations produce fainting, nausea, headache, languor. If, however, they are often repeated, they produce nervous and other fevers, or impart to fevers arising from other causes a typhoid type.... As there appear to be no cases in which the emanations from decomposing human remains are not of a deleterious nature, so there is no case in which the liability to danger should be incurred by interment amidst the dwellings of the living, it being established as a general conclusion that all interments in towns where bodies decompose, contribute to the mass of atmospheric impurity which is injurious to public health.”
The Italian physician Felix Dell’Acqua gives it as his opinion (in his study on cremation), that graveyards infect the earth, the air, and the water, and constantly endanger public health during an epidemic. Dr. Polli proved that graves deteriorate the air we breathe and contaminate the water we drink, by loading them with organic matter.