The disposal of the dead : a plea for legislation, and a protest against cremation / by Francis Seymour Haden.

  • Francis Seymour Haden
Date:
[1888?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The disposal of the dead : a plea for legislation, and a protest against cremation / by Francis Seymour Haden. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    report and nine years after the publication of Mr. Walker's book, the Government, by the machinery of a board of health created pro hac vice, closed the graveyards in question and forbade further inter- ments within the walls. Then, in 1854, having dissolved the board of health and sanctioned the opening by joint stock companies of new cemeteries, it ceased all further action. Practically, therefore, beyond the fiction of forbidding intramural interments, and the opening of cemeteries outside the town to become in no long time as much inside the town as those they had abandoned, Govern- ment did nothing ; while, so far as the recommendations of its own board went, many of them of great practical value and founded on evidence taken in all parts of Europe, and all pointing more or less to the absolute necessity for legislation, it disregarded them altogether. Given, the growth of a great living city, it seems to have taken for granted that a great dead city must, of necessity, grow up with it. In the City proper, the dead having shouldered out the living, the living left and went to live elsewhere. The inhabitants of the suburbs would have to do the same. The fault was in the great city. A genera- tion would elapse before the new cemeteries would become full. The matter might therefore wait. But a generation did not elapse, or any- thing like a generation, before, the new cemeteries being already full, the whole question cropped up again. The living population having increased by three millions, the dead population increased two millions, and with this important condition attached to the latter fact, that, while the living died, the dead did not, but remained. And this was not all, because the tenure of the soil by the dead being per- manent and the rate of their increase over the living in the ratio of two to one with each generation, the question of their disposal, then difficult enough, became out of all proportion more difficult as time went on. Meanwhile the problem to be solved was always spoken of as over-crowding, and the only remedy suggested for it the repeated opening of new cemeteries. It was under these circumstances that, in 1875—impatient of a position at once so helpless and so little creditable to us as a practical people, and scarcely less so of certain fanciful proposals which were just then being put forward for its correction—I ventured to advance the alter-