Further corroboration of the aforesaid subject.
In the month of September, 1784, a poor woman died in the Hospital at Aberdeen, and was buried in a church yard in the neighbourhood. A company of young Surgeons, agreed with the grave digger, to set some mark on the grave, as a direction for them to find the body for anatomical purposes; but some person in order to disappoint the grave-digger’s employers, moved the signal to another grave, that of a woman who had been buried about three or four months. The party came, and directed by the mark agreed upon, dug up the grave, drew out the coffin, and carried it home. But upon opening it, a vapour like flame of brimstone came forth, and suffocated them in an instant. Two women also going past the room, fell down dead, and it was said, that eleven persons thus perished from the baneful effluvia.
It is very common, observes Doctor Buchan, in this country, to have church-yards in the middle of populous cities. Whether this be the effect of ancient superstition, or owing to the increase of such towns, is a matter of no consequence. Whatever gave rise to the custom, it is a bad one. It is habit alone which reconciles us to these things; by means of which the most ridiculous, nay pernicious customs, often become sacred. Certain it is, that thousands of putrid carcases, so near the surface of the earth, in a place where the air is confined, cannot fail to taint it; and that such air when breathed into the lungs, must occasion diseases.
In most Eastern countries it was customary to bury the dead at some distance from any town. As this practice obtained sanction among the Jews, the Greeks, and also the Romans, it is strange that the Western parts of Europe should not have followed their example in a custom so truly laudable.
Burying in churches is still more detestable. The air in churches is seldom good, and the effluvia from putrid carcases must render it still worse. Churches are commonly old buildings with arched roofs. They are seldom open above once a week, are never ventilated by fires, nor open windows, and rarely kept clean. This occasions that damp, musty, unwholesome smell which one feels upon entering a church, and renders it a very unsafe place for the weak and valetudinary. These inconveniences might in a great measure, be obviated, by prohibiting all persons from burying within churches, by keeping them clean, and permitting a stream of fresh air to pass frequently through them, by opening opposite doors and windows.
The practice of burying the dead, says the doctor, in the centre of populous neighbourhoods, is still too generally continued. Churches and church-yards are made the chief places of interment, in direct opposition to reason, and to the example of the most enlightened people of antiquity. The first words of the old Roman inscriptions on tomb stones, “Siste viator,” Stop, traveller, shew that the dead were buried by the side of public roads, not in temples, nor in the heart of towns and cities. One of the laws of the late Joseph II. relative to this point, will do him immortal honour. After strictly prohibiting the interment of dead bodies in any church or chapel. “It is horrid,” says the Emperor, “that a place of worship, a temple of the Supreme Being, should be converted into a pest-house for living creatures! a person who, upon his death-bed, makes it a condition of his will to be buried in a church or chapel, acts like a madman: he ought to set his fellow-creatures a good example, and not to do all in his power to destroy their constitutions, by exposing them to the effluvia arising from a corpse in a state of putrefaction.”
The admirable sentiment expressed by one of our own country-women, who died a few years since, afford a striking contrast with the superstitious folly so justly stigmatized by the Emperor.
This extraordinary female, whose mind was superior to the weakness of her sex, and to the prejudices of custom, being fully sensible, as she herself expressed it in her last will, “that the bodies of the dead might be offensive to the living,” ordered her body to be burnt, and the ashes deposited in an urn, in the burying ground of St. Georges, Hanover-Square, where the remains of the sentimental Yorrick, are also interred.
To prevent the dreadful contagion in future, that might otherwise arise from thoughtless and wicked people, prematurely stealing dead bodies from their graves, the following easy method of securing the same, is strongly recommended as an effectual preventative.