During the month of March, 1781, and the half-year preceding it, an epidemic raged at Pasajes, Spain, which befell 127 persons, of which number 83 died. This epidemic was attributed to the poisonous vapors arising from the overcrowded vaults of the parish church.
Trousseau mentions the case of a grave-digger who was attacked by small-pox soon after opening the grave of an individual who had died of that malady many years ago.
Mr. Cooper charged an outbreak of small-pox in Eyam, Derbyshire, Eng., to the excavation of an old cemetery.
A dispatch from Montreal, dated Oct. 26, 1885, states that a grave-digger of St. Sulpice, named Robitaille, made a grave next to where a man who died from small-pox a month ago was buried. At the time there was no small-pox in the village; but Robitaille, some days after digging the grave, sickened and finally died of small-pox, making it evident that he contracted the disease from the body of a man who had been buried for a month.
Recent scientific discoveries confirm the opinion long held by persons endowed with common sense that the germs of many infectious and contagious diseases retain their vitality and the power to spread the respective malady in the grave and the layers of earth surrounding it. By means of these germs, yellow fever, cholera, small-pox, splenic fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and other diseases belonging to the same category, can be communicated from the dead to the living, even years after burial. Concerning splenic fever, which can be transmitted from animal to man, the great French investigator and pathologist, Louis Pasteur, says:—
“Recently, we discovered the characteristic germs in pits in which animals dead of splenic fever (charbon) had been buried for 12 years; and their culture was as virulent as that from the blood of an animal recently dead. Anthracoid germs in the earth of pits in which animals have been buried are brought to the surface by earthworms; and in this fact we may find the whole etiology of the disease, inasmuch as the animals swallow these germs with their food.”
The British Medical Journal in 1880 commented on Pasteur’s great discovery as follows:—
“Pasteur’s recent researches on the etiology of ‘charbon’ shows that this earth-mould positively contains the specific germs which propagate the disease, and that the same specific germs are found within the intestines of the worms. The parasitic organism, or bacteridium, which, inoculated from a diseased to a healthy animal, propagates the specific disease, may be destroyed by putrefaction after burial. But before this process has been completed, germs or spores may have been formed which will resist the putrefactive process for many years, and lie in a condition of latent life, like a grain of corn, or any flower-seed, ready to germinate and communicate the specific disease. In a field in the Jura, where a diseased cow had been buried two years before at a depth of nearly seven feet, the surface earth not having been disturbed in the interval, Pasteur found that the mould contained germs which, introduced by inoculation into a guinea-pig, produced charbon and death. Further, if a worm be taken from an infected spot, the earth in the alimentary canal of the worm contains these spores or germs of charbon, which, inoculated, propagate the disease; and the mould deposited on the surface by the worm, when dried into dust, is blown over the grass and plants on which the cattle feed, and may thus spread the disease. After various farming operations of tilling and harvest, Pasteur has found the germs just over the graves of the diseased cattle, but not to any great distance. After rains or morning dews the germs of charbon, with a quantity of other germs, were found about the neighboring plants; and Pasteur says that in cemeteries it is very possible that germs capable of propagating specific diseases of different kinds quite harmless to the earthworm may be carried to the surface of the soil, ready to cause disease in the proper animals. The practical inferences in favor of cremation are so strong that, in Pasteur’s words, they ‘need not be enforced.’”
FURNACE OF THE BUFFALO CREMATORIUM.
(Venini system.)