“These are times that are trying men’s and women’s bodies quite as much as their souls. The zymotic diseases breaking out in what were formerly healthy villages may set even the blindest to seek for causes; and perhaps the most prejudiced may finally be forced to admit that one great source of water contamination is the existence of multitudinous graveyards contiguous to habitations. In my daily excursions on horseback, which cover about 15 miles, I count seven graveyards perched on hills, the occupants of the adjacent towns preparing for speedy exit from this world by living below the dead and using well-water. Suggest to them that the prevailing ‘malaria’ may be due to drinking up the remains of their deceased ancestors, and a howl of ‘sacrilege’ rends the air.”
And in an admirable essay on cremation in the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat of July 12, 1885, this graceful writer, deservedly noted, states:—
“New England villages, once so free from ills, are taking on the airs of invalids; and it is often a question whether families that remain in big towns during the summer are not better off than their wealthier neighbors, who hie to overcrowded so-called watering places, not unfrequently returning with germs of typhoid fever in their systems, that later breaks forth to their amazement, and for which they are at a loss to account. They forget how they drank well-water, the springs of which percolated through peaceful village graveyards. Man’s worst enemies are his own superstition and ignorance.
“I learned by terrible experience when very young the horrors of earth burial. I now know its crime against the living.”
Miss Field is not only converted to but convinced of incineration, convinced that it is preferable to any other method; the moment a cremation society was incorporated in New York, she became a member.
Col. R. E. Whitman, U. S. A., remarks: “People who wonder at the change that has come over our New England villages, the homes of a vigorous ancestry, and deplore the advent of this mysterious ‘malaria,’ the unseen vampire that sucks the red blood of the present generation, would do well to look about them and see how the graveyards, old and new, have grown in two centuries, how the town has surrounded them; how the water supply is from the same old wells; how the town, never having arrived at a magnitude seeming to demand a sewerage system, allows the refuse of generations to mingle with the surface soil. It would be a theme worthy of the magic pen of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Imagine his description of water percolating through the grave of some despised Lazarus, feeding the well of his life enemy, Dives, and compelling him daily to quaff the poison his own cruel ignorance had distilled.”
Undoubtedly many country towns whose cemeteries are in their midst are drinking daily, despite the acknowledged impurity of the water, disease and death. An English writer very pertinently remarks that “if the formation of a deep sewer will suffice to drain dry the wells near its line of march, then the sinking of a well near a burying-ground must help to drain the latter.”
Much complaint was at one time made in England, concerning the pollution of wells by cemeteries. In Versailles, France, the water of the wells which lie below the churchyard of St. Louis, could not be used on account of its pollution.
Deep wells have been found to be infected more than 600 feet from the cemeteries. In France and in some parts of Germany, the opening of wells within 300 feet of a cemetery has been prohibited. The reports of the boards of health of Massachusetts and New Jersey give abundant evidence that country graveyards often contaminate the water supply when the wells are on a lower level. The Michigan reports also contain a description of a case that occurred at Grand Rapids.
A hygienic council held some time ago at Brussels decided that wells could not be safely dug nearer than 400 yards to any graveyard, and that even at that distance absolute protection was not certain.