SANITARY ENTOMBMENT: THE IDEAL DISPOSITION OF THE DEAD.[4]
In this country, partly because there were few places of large population, and partly because it was an early and general tendency to use cemeteries rather than churches, and the grounds adjacent to them, the evils of earth-burial did not manifest themselves so soon or in so marked a manner as in the Old World. But there were instances enough to convince the most incredulous that a radical change must be made. Dr. Ackerly, writing in 1822, thus describes the condition of the burial-ground connected with Trinity Church, New York, forty years before: "During the Revolutionary War this ground emitted pestilential vapors, the recollection of which is not obliterated from the memory of a number of living witnesses." In the same year, the Commercial Advertiser published an article in reference to the present evils of earth-burial at the same place, in which it was said: "It will be remembered that the graveyard, being above the streets on the west, and encompassed by a massive stone wall, and the east side being on a level with Broadway, it results that this body of earth, the surface of which has no declivity to carry off the rain, thus becomes a great reservoir of contaminating fluids suspended above the adjacent streets. In proof of this, it is stated that, in a house in Thames Street, springs of water pouring in from that ground occasioned the removal of the tenants on account of their exceeding fetidness." At a later date, Dr. Elisha Harris brought this telling indictment against the same place of interment: "Trinity churchyard has been the centre of a very fatal prevalence of cholera whenever the disease has occurred as an endemic near or within a quarter of a mile of it. Trinity Place, west of it, Rector Street, on its border, the streets west of Rector and the occupants of the neighboring offices and commercial houses have suffered severely at each visitation of the pest from 1832 to 1854." It seems hardly necessary to add that the foregoing statements are not intended to make the impression that there was a worse condition at the churchyard named than at any other....
It may now be said: "Yes, this is all true, but we have changed all that! We no longer inter our dead in churchyards or burial-grounds within the limits of cities. We have provided cemeteries at great distances from our cities and large centres of population, and there the dead can do no harm."
To this the reply is easy and convincing: "that, if the dead endanger the living when the population is dense, they certainly also endanger them when the population is sparse. The danger is only diluted. It still exists, and it ought to alarm us just as truly when a few are imperilled as when many are." ...
Not to attempt to tell all that has been ascertained, it will be sufficiently convincing to quote from Sir Henry Thompson's utterance in the Nineteenth Century in 1880: "I state, as a fact of the highest importance, that, by burial in earth, we effectively provide—whatever sanitary precautions are taken by ventilation and drainage, whatever disinfection is applied after contagion has occurred—that the pestilential germs, which have destroyed the body in question, are thus so treasured and protected as to propagate and multiply, ready to reappear and work like ruin hereafter for others.... Beside anthrax or splenic fever, spores from which are notoriously brought to the surface from buried animals below, and become fatal to the herds feeding there, it is now almost certain that malarial diseases, notably Roman fever and even tetanus, are due to bacteria which flourish in the soil itself. The poisons of scarlet fever, enteric fever (typhoid), small-pox, diphtheria and malignant cholera are undoubtedly transmissible through earth from the buried body." That the burial of a body that contains the seeds of zymotic disease is simply storing them for future reproduction and destruction is amply proved by the researches of Darwin and Pasteur, of whom the former has shown that the mould, or fertile upper layer of superficial soil, has largely acquired its character by its passage through the digestive tract of earth-worms; and the latter that this mould, when brought by this agency to the surface from subjacent soil that has been used as a grave, contains the specific germ of the disease that has destroyed its tenant.
It may now be asked: "Granting that these evils are inseparable from the burial of the dead in the earth or in tombs, what is the remedy? What else can be done?"
To this question not many answers can be given, because the modes of disposing of the dead have always been and must always be few.
Plainly, no such novel mode as casting the dead into the sea will be generally adopted. Plainly, also, the mode of the Parsees, grounded as it is in ancient, if not original use—to give the dead to beasts and birds—will not become universal. And, plainly also, cremation will not be welcome to the many, free as it is from objection on the score of public health, if a method equally sanitary, and at the same time satisfactory to a reverent and tender sentiment, can be devised.