Interment and disinterment : a further exposition of the practices pursued in the metropolitan places of sepulture, and the results as affecting the health of the living : in a series of letters to the editor of the Morning Herald / by G.A. Walker.
- Date:
- 1843
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Interment and disinterment : a further exposition of the practices pursued in the metropolitan places of sepulture, and the results as affecting the health of the living : in a series of letters to the editor of the Morning Herald / by G.A. Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![Letter VII. [From the Morning Herald, December 28, 1842.] Sir,—On the subject of burying-grounds, and the poisonous effluvia arising from dead bodies, no better authority can be cited than Fourcroy. Appointed by the t rench Government to superintend the exhumation of a vast number of bodies, the mor- tality of centuries, interred in the then burying-ground, (now the site of the Marche des Innocents) Paris, he says—“ We had a strong desire to satisfy our- selves, by experiment, what was the nature of the destructive air given off from decaying bodies. In vain we attempted to induce the grave-diggers to procure us au examination of this elastic fluid in other burying-grounds,— they uniformly refused, — declaring that it was only by an unlucky accident they interfeied with dead bodies in that dangerous state. The horrible odour and the poisonous activity of this fluid announce to us, that if it is mingled, as there is no reason to doubt, with hydro- genous and azotic gas, holding sulphur and phosphorus in solution, ordinary and known products of putrefaction, it may contain also another deleterious vapour, whose nature has hitherto escaped philosophical research, while its terrible action upon life is too strikingly evinced. Perhaps it belongs to another order of bodies, to a substance more attenuated and fugacious than the bases of the known elastic fluids ; and that in this view the constituent matter of this gas operates. May it not be credited, that to this septic miasma is owing the diseases to which persons are exposed who live in the neighbourhood of burying-grounds, sewers, and, in short, all places where animal substances, in heaps, undergo spontaneous decomposition ? May we not be permitted to suppose that a poison so terrible as to cause the sudden extinction of animal life, when it escapes pure and concentrated from its focus, or place of prodtiction, may, when received and diluted in the atmosphere, retain activity enough to produce on the nervous and sensible solids of animals, an operation capable of benumbing their functions and deranging their motions ? Since we have witnessed the terror which this dangerous poison excites among the labourers in cemeteries— since we have seen in a great number of them a paleness of face, and all the symp- toms of a slow poison, it would be more unsafe to deny the effects of these exhala- tions upon the neighbouring inhabitants, than to multiply and exaggerate complaints, as has been done, by an abusive application of the discoveries by physics upon air and other elastic fluids.” One can scarcely credit that any person can be so igno- rant or so unprincipled, as to assert that the Public Health suffers no injury from the existence of places from which immense volumes of these poisonous gases are constantly in process of evolution, and that too in localities where the compactness and the immense number of the living population must alone tend considerably to diminish the quantity of thepabulumvitce, the element indispensable for existence—the oxygen of the atmosphere. In large towns, and among a compact population, as in London, where the daily expenditure of nervous and muscular energy of the majority of its inhabitants is so constant and so excessive—where with the professional, the literary man, the artizan, and the various classes of a most industrious and hardly worked community (more especially in crowded busy neighbourhoods), the toe of the night treads on the heel of the morrow, and the toil of the day is scarcely permitted to be forgotten in the repose of the night—how important is it to themselves,their relations or dependants, and the society of which they are units, that during the periods when Wiexcpower of resistance against malarious influence is weakened by sleep, the atmos- phere they are insensibly breathing should be in as pure a condition, or, in other words, as free from mechanical admixture, as possible !* How important is it, I repeat, that present legislation should retrieve the errors of the past. A superior education, and pecuniary means, enable the higher classes of society to locate themselves beyond the reach (at least they think so) of malarious influence. The principle is a selfish one—the practice even more than doubtful. May they be warned in time ! They have never, as yet, roused themselves from their dangerous dreaming, until * The thousands who in their daily avocations thread the sinuosities of the surface of Lon- don—dotted as it is with hundreds of overcharged, and consequently insecure, burial-places— in many of which practices are—must—be pursued, that sink the man immeasurably below the brute—might reasonably ask themselves the question: How has it come to pass, by what gradual, yet inevitable, process of deterioration has it happened, that men can be found em- ployers, or employed as actors, in such scenes 1 By wliat consentaneous permission is it that such an heterogeneous compound of stuff, called air, largely impregnated, as I shall further prove in my next letter, with emanations from dead bodies, should continue to be compla- cently—contentedly—breathed by governors and governed; and how much longer will cer- tain persons be permitted to carry on their infamous “ management ?’’ D](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21915441_0023.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
