According to Dr. Ebenezer Duncan eight thousand bodies are buried yearly in Glasgow and its neighbourhood, poisoning both air and water, and endangering the public health. The same state of things has existed in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and other large towns. The following resolution was unanimously adopted in the Preventive Medicine Department of a Health Congress, Glasgow, in July, 1896:—
“That in the opinion of this Congress cremation of the dead, especially in cases of infectious disease, is a natural and very desirable hygienic process, and that this Congress of the British Institute of Public Health use all proper means to urge upon the Government the desirability of their promoting a measure to enable sanitary authorities, if they so desire, to build crematoria and to conduct them under proper superintendence.”
It must be allowed, however, that cremation, in spite of its obvious advantages, is not one of those movements which advance by leaps and bounds. The recent annual report of the Cremation Society of England states that during the last year there were two hundred and eight cremations in the United Kingdom—viz., one hundred and fifty at Woking, and fifty-eight at Manchester. Crematoria have recently been established at Glasgow and Liverpool.
CHAPTER XXI.
WAITING MORTUARIES.
Of all the various methods that have been suggested or introduced for the prevention of premature interment, none has been attended with such satisfactory results as the erection of mortuaries (Leichenhäuser) in Germany. These structures, described in pp. 294 et seq., ought to be provided, as far as practicable, in every parish, and certainly in every Sanitary District in the United Kingdom, and by the Boards of Health in the United States, and adapted to the requirements of the population. They should be of chaste and elegant design, well ventilated; their atmosphere made antiseptic with living plants and flowers, and by plenty of light; provided with baths and couches, and a skilled attendant—edifices where both the dead and the apparent dead can be deposited pending burial, cremation, or resuscitation. Separate compartments are necessary for cases where death has been due to accidents and for those who have succumbed to infectious diseases. Every modern appliance should be introduced for the restoration of such as may exhibit signs of returning consciousness, and of those in whom, after sufficient time had elapsed, no sign of putrefaction was observable. The temperature of the room should be kept at eighty-four degrees, as suggested by Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, and no interment, cremation, post-mortem, or embalming should be permitted until a medical examination by one or more experienced physicians showed unequivocal signs of putrefaction. Perhaps the Royal Humane Society, which during the last one hundred and fifty years has done such splendid work in restoring the drowned and asphyxiated, might be willing to extend the field of its benevolent operations to other neglected forms of suspended animation where intelligent direction and supervision is so much required.
A writer in the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, 1855, vol. xv., p. 75, says:—“The earliest movements in the direction of means for the prevention of premature interments originated with Winslow in France, followed by other well-known writers upon the signs of death. It was Madame Necker, however, who embodied their suggestions in a practicable form as submitted to the National Assembly, in 1792, by Count Berchshold. In the ninth year of the first French Republic (1801) a project was entertained for the erection of six ‘temples funeraires’ in Paris, but came to no good, as attendant evils preponderated. To Germany belongs the credit of having executed these designs in such wise that they should not prove the positive sources of more danger to the living than could be counter-balanced by the occasional preservation of an individual from the risk of premature interment. Believing that this risk had been prodigiously diminished since the establishment of these institutions for the reception of cases where doubt of the reality of death has existed, Hufeland, in Weimar, devised the plan that Frankfort-on-the-Maine incorporated with its reform in sepulture and establishment of extra-mural cemeteries, in 1823. Hufeland’s plans have subsequently been adopted and carried out in many other German States.... As a sanitary measure the separation of the dead from the living, especially from among the crowded poor, would be, apart from the not less important point of verification of death, an incalculable benefit.... It behoves us in this matter to learn another lesson from our neighbours, and to take measures to prevent the occurrence of catastrophes too fearfully horrible to contemplate in thought, too dreadful for the most vivid imagination to realise. Science can hold out no token by which to recognise the certainty of death. Sanitary police, at least in England, is indifferent about the risk of a few burials alive, and thinks it superfluous to prevent their occurrence.”
That the people have a right to protection by the State against preventable sources of danger, all civilised nations have acknowledged, by the making of laws that guard their citizens from the invasion of diseases of domestic or foreign origin, as well as many other perils. THE GERMAN SYSTEM.But the German-speaking countries have gone further than any other in this humane direction by recognising apparent death as a special peril to be guarded against by law, in order to prevent living burials. For this purpose they have established mortuaries connected with cemeteries, in which the apparently dead are placed, under the observation of physicians and attendants. Here the bodies are placed upon tables, dressed in their ordinary clothes, amidst light, warmth, and ventilation, surrounded by plants and floral tributes. Thus they are kept from forty-eight to seventy-two hours, unless decomposition sets in earlier, or the death was due to an infectious disease. Further delay is allowed on application by the attending physician, or by some member of the family interested. Cords connected with an alarm bell are attached to the fingers, under the conviction that the least movement of the body would arouse the attendant in an adjoining room. No doubt these mortuaries have saved a certain number from being buried alive; but the system can be improved by extending the observation until such time as death is certain, for experience shows that no stated limit of time can apply to all cases of trance and catalepsy, which are the chief causes of apparent death. Some of these continue for a week, and cases of even longer duration are not unknown. It often happens that returning vital activity consists merely in scarcely perceptible movements of the eyelids or the mouth, a change of the complexion, slight moisture on the face, or a faint action of the heart, or a warmth in that region, or feeble thoracic movements—all of which might escape observation until the allotted time had expired, and no contrivance, however delicately adjusted, could announce their presence. Time alone will test the existence of life or death in such cases.