The scientific world was lately startled by the gladsome news that Dr. Domingo Freire, a physician of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, had discovered the peculiar microbe of yellow fever. The blood of yellow fever patients swarms with these microbes (cryptococci), which, by inoculation, produce the disease in animals. Dr. Freire named the microbe cryptococcus xanthogenicus. He was aided in his labors, to detect the specific germ of yellow fever, which included microscopic and spectroscopic examinations as well as experiments on animals, by his able assistant, Señor Menezes Doria.
Dr. Freire also examined some soil from the cemetery of Jurujuba, where victims of the yellow jack (as we call this fever sometimes) lie interred. Some of this earth was dried and then placed in a cage which contained a guinea pig. Previously to the introduction of the earth, the blood of the animal was examined microscopically, and found to contain no bacteria of any kind. The animal became ill, and died within five days. When its tissues were examined after death, they were found to present all the characteristic changes which yellow fever brings about. The blood was full of cryptococci xanthogenici in various degrees of development. The urine was highly albuminous. The brain and the intestines were stained yellow by the infiltration of the coloring matter of the cryptococci. After this discovery, the doctor recommended that all victims of yellow fever be destroyed by fire, to prevent general infection. The Brazilian government (one of the most enlightened in the world) immediately ordered that a cremation furnace be built at Jurujuba, in which all those that die of yellow fever there must be incinerated.
The St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal makes this very sensible suggestion regarding the disposition of the remains of those dying of yellow fever in our own United States. It says:—
“From what we have learned from private sources, the resurrection of the bodies, during the winter months, of those who died of yellow fever, has done much to perpetuate this terrible disease in southern cities, until the warm weather has set in. Cremation obviates all possible harm that can come from the dead, and duty to the living demands that everything be done to destroy the possibility of propagating this and all contagious diseases that run so malignant a course.”
Dr. J. F. A. Adams says:—
“Dr. Joseph Akerly expressed the belief that Trinity Churchyard had been an active cause of the yellow fever in New York in 1822, aggravating the malignity of the epidemic in its vicinity. This church was built in 1698, and the ground had been receiving the dead for 124 years. Sometimes bodies were buried only 18 inches below the surface, and it was impossible to dig without disturbing the remains. During the Revolutionary War, this burial-ground had emitted pestilential odors, and in 1781 Hessian soldiers were employed to cover the ground with a layer of earth two or three feet in depth. The ground was unusually offensive in 1782, and annoyed passengers on the surrounding streets previous to the appearance of the yellow fever in July. During the epidemic, the condition of this churchyard, and the virulence of the disease in its vicinity, called for some active measures, and on the night of Sept. 22 Dr. Roosa covered the ground with 52 casks of quicklime, the stench being at the time so excessive as to cause several laborers to vomit. On the 25th and 26th of the same month St. Paul’s Churchyard, and the vaults of the North Dutch Church in William Street, received the same treatment, these being likewise very offensive and foci of epidemics.”
When the yellow fever raged in New Orleans in 1853, the death-rate in the Fourth District (in which there were three large burial-grounds) was 452 per 1000 of the population.
Dr. Bryant, writing on yellow fever at Norfolk in 1855, regards cemeteries as a constant source of danger in an epidemic, and urges the total forbidding of intramural or even near-by suburban cemeteries.
Sir Spencer Wells related a fact recently at a meeting of the Health Exhibition in London, England, which has a strong bearing on the source of epidemics and their annihilation by cremation. Some persons who had died of scarlet fever were interred in a country graveyard. Thirty years afterward the cemetery was included in a neighboring garden, and the old graves dug up. Scarlet fever forthwith broke out in the rectory and parish, and no other probable source having been discovered, it is impossible to avoid the inference that the germs of scarlatinal infection can retain their vitality a third of a century.
In epidemics individuals should be forced to allow their dead (unless they succumb to some disease other than the prevailing scourge) to be cremated. To stamp out a contagious or infectious malady, or to arrest its progress, incineration must be made general; its benefits are nil when confined to isolated cases. The individual must stand back when the public health is in jeopardy.