The most common diseases produced by graveyard gases are diphtheria, throat and pulmonary affections, severe diarrhœa, and dysentery. The number of cases reported is enormous. Many cases have been made public by Drs. Parkes and Tardieu.
Ramazzini (Maladies des Artisans, p. 71) asserts that sextons, whose business often compels them to enter places where there are putrefying bodies, are subject to malignant fevers, asphyxia, and suffocating catarrhs.
Fourcroy affirms that there are innumerable examples of the pernicious effects of cadaveric exhalations.
It has been stated that the carbonic acid generated by the decaying bodies is taken up by the plants, shrubbery, and trees abounding in cemeteries and their neighborhood. That excellent and well-edited newspaper Iron declares: “The consumption of vegetables whose roots had been nourished by the defunct members of a family would hardly be enjoyed by the survivors, unless, indeed, they possessed the philosophic mind and robust appetite of the French gentleman who declared that, with a certain sauce, ‘on mangerait bien son père.’”
I do not believe that very much carbonic acid is absorbed by the botanical burial-ground decorations; certainly not enough to prevent its toxic action and the vitiation of the air.
Many a time was premature exhumation followed by fatal consequences.
In the church of a village near Nantes, France, the remains of an aristocrat were buried in 1774. By accident some of the other graves were opened, among them one which contained the corpse of a man who had been buried three months before. An unbearable odor immediately filled the church. Many persons who had attended at this burial were taken sick; fifteen died in a short time, the first to depart being the grave-digger who had opened the graves.
Vicq d’Azyr states that an epidemic was produced in Auvergne, by the opening of an old graveyard.
Norman Chevers (European Soldiers in India, p. 404) refers to the unhealthiness of the continent at Sukkur, India. Fevers of the most malignant type were abounding, owing to an ancient Mussulman burial-ground on which the station was placed.
Tardieu, the eminent French physician and scientist, relates (Dict. d’Hygiene, p. 517) that the excavation of an old cemetery of a convent in Paris caused illness in the occupants of the adjacent dwellings. Tardieu (Ibid., p. 463) compiled a very considerable number of cases, not only of asphyxia, but of several febrile affections produced by exhumation and disturbance of bodies.