Report to the board of police of Glasgow, by the medical officer and the master of works, on intramural burying grounds.

  • Gairdner, W. T. (William Tennant), Sir, 1824-1907.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report to the board of police of Glasgow, by the medical officer and the master of works, on intramural burying grounds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    4 present, would be, in the first place, an absolute impossibility of disposing of the dead; and, in the second place, even after private enterprise had been fully brought into play, an enormous increase in the expense of the funerals of the poor, which would of itself be enough to pauperise numbers of families thrown into sudden affliction by calamity, If we were even to recommend, what upon grounds of principle seems only decent and seemly, that a grave, once opened, should be in general reserved for a time for one, or even for a strictly limited number of bodies, at a certain fixed depth below the surface, the effect of such a recommendation sud- denly and generally carried out might be to double or treble the expenses of the poorer class of funerals, and probably to place it quite beyond the power of a large number of families to procure the interment of their dead otherwise than by throwing the responsibility on the parish. And for the pauper class of funerals the expenses would be increased in a still greater proportion, so that, in the shape of increased rates, the burden would ultimately reach the community as a whole. We do not urge these as reasons for leaving things as they are at present; but we feel compelled to state them as difficulties in the way of improvement, and especially of sudden improvement. The difficulties of the case are not lessened by the recent decision of the Town Council against the interference of the Corporation, by Act of Parliament, to secure extramural burying grounds. On this point, as indeed in the general bearing of their Report, we participate entirely in the views of the Committee of Town Council. It seems to us an error to regard the burial of the dead, in a large city like Glasgow, as a matter to be left to the operation of private enterprise. The inadequacy of the ordinary laws of supply and demand to meet the case appears evident, when it is considered that the great majority of the poor, and of the classes having the highest mortality, live and die in the very heart of the town, where the mere fact of sepulture may be considered a gross violation of sanitary