The cremation of the dead: considered from an aesthetic, sanitary, religious, historical, medico-legal, and economical standpointErichsen, Hugo
Religion
The cremation of the dead: considered from an aesthetic, sanitary, religious, historical, medico-legal, and economical standpoint
Erichsen, Hugo
Cremation
There is much evidence to show that cholera was repeatedly caused by the
excavation of the graves of those who had died of the disease, and that
it raged with special violence in the vicinity of cemeteries.
Dr. Sutherland attested the fact that cholera was unusually prevalent in
the immediate neighborhood of London graveyards. This, however, need not
astonish us, when we consider that the soil of churchyards in some of
the poorer districts in London was raised two, three, or even four feet
in a few years. The great prevalence of epidemic diseases in some parts
of the city finally led to the formation of the Epidemiological Society
of London, under the presidency of Dr. Babington.
When the cholera visited London in 1854, Mr. Simon asserted that if the
soil of the cemeteries in which the plague-stricken of 1665 were buried
would be upturned, it would make the prevailing scourge more virulent.
It was done in spite of his warning, and his prediction was verified.
In 1826, when cholera made its appearance in Egypt, the French
government sent out medical officers to discover, if possible, its
origin. It was traced to an old and disused cemetery at Kelioub, a
village near Cairo.
The outbreak of cholera at Modena, Italy, in 1828, was shown by
Professor Bianchi to be due to the upturning of the ground of
burial-yards in which victims of the plague had been inhumed 300 years
before.
Nov. 12, 1836, Miaulis, the adjutant of Otto the First, of Greece, was
attacked by cholera, of which he finally died. The body was given in
charge of three men, who also assisted at the post-mortem examination.
On the third day after the funeral of the adjutant, one of the men,
Jacob Kuehnlein, 72 years of age, was taken ill, and died the following
day. The autopsy proved the disease to be Asiatic cholera. Three days
after Kuehnlein’s burial, the second of the men who had guarded Miaulis’
remains, J. Stroehlein by name, aged 48, was stricken down by the
cholera, to which he succumbed within two days.
Schauenburg (Cholera, etc., Wuerzburg, 1874, p. 8) gives it as his
opinion that decomposition is favorable to the development of cholera
germs, which means the propagation of the _comma bacillus_.
The Italians do not only stand at the head of the cremation movement
to-day, but they recognized the value of that sure and never-failing
germicide—fire—as early as 1837; in that year thousands of the victims
of the cholera epidemic, then raging in Italy, were burned on the
seashore at Palermo.
The report of the London Board of Health for 1849 directs attention to
the fact that the cholera was especially prevalent and fatal in the
neighborhood of graveyards. This, however, need not cause any surprise,
as the _London Athenæum_, to this day one of the most reliable journals
of the United Kingdom, states in 1850 that, during the prevalence of the
scourge, 500 bodies, dead of cholera, were daily interred, in addition
to those of other diseases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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