PACIFIC MEDICAL JOURNAL.

Vol. XXXVII.

MAY, 1894.

No. 5.

Original Articles.

CREMATION, THE ONLY SANITARY METHOD OF DISPOSING OF THE DEAD.

By W. F. McNUTT, M. D., M. R. C. S. Edin., etc.

Professor of Principles and Practice of Medicine, Medical Department University of California.

(Read before the California State Sanitary Convention, April 16, 1891.) It is not within the province of this article to give the history of the various methods of disposing of the dead. It becomes necessary, however, to say a few words on this aspect of the subject in order to show that the treatment or disposal of the dead is not a matter of ethics, or a question of morals or religion. The method of disposing of the dead in all countries is a matter of sentiment, superstition, usage and necessity. But by all civilized people, it should be dealt with as a purely sanitary matter. A reference to history is the more necessary as so many of the English speaking people look upon inhumation or burial of the dead as a Christian rite-part of the Christian religion, and that all other methods of disposing of the dead are only to be practiced by a pagan or heathen people. While, as a matter of fact, Christian nation; do, at the present time, mostly bury their dead, the nation of all others that is most wedded and prejudiced in favor of inhumation and that has practiced this method for hundreds of years before the Christian religion was ever dreamt of, is the Chinese. Neither history nor tradition reveals any information of the time when the Chinese disposed of their dead by any other method. At the present time their strong attachment for inhumation seems to depend upon the mere superstition that misfortune will follow the family whose dead are not at rest in the ground; and they carry their superstition to the point of insisting that no other ground than that of China. can fulfill the requirement. To whatever land he may wander,

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in whatever land he may die, it is the sacred duty of the surviving friends to see that his bones, at least, find their final resting place in the land of his birth—in the Flowery Kingdom-and near some place that was dear to him in the days of his childhood.

In Japan, cremation is practiced by the Monto sect, but Shintos bury, while the aboriginal tribes in the remote north have been known to dry or desiccate the body and subsequently bury it. The ancient Peruvians dried the bodies of the dead in the sun and finally buried them in mounds. A tribe in South Australia places the dead body at the top of their huts and keep up fires until the body is desiccated, when it is hidden in the trees. Some of our North American Indians dry their dead by exposure to the sun. The Syrians were known to place their dead at the disposal of wild dogs; while the Parsees for hundreds of years have had their "Towers of Silence" upon which they place their dead and bury only their bones when the birds of prey have devoured the flesh. The Hindoos not unfrequently place a dead body on the bank of a river to be disposed of by river monsters. Many Kaffir tribes give their dead to the wild beasts; the Egyptians embalmed; the Hebrews mostly entombed, while the Hindoos, Greeks and Romans cremated. Sea burial is practiced to some extent, especially among Island aborigines, while deep sea burial has been recommended by several sanitarians to obviate the harmful effects of inhumation. One writer, Viritz, recommended that dead ships be kept on the coast and that daily departures be made for mid-ocean where the bodies shall be committed to the deep. Water burial, however, is not likely to be practiced to any great extent, and many objections might be advanced against it. It has been thought by some that bodies might be petrified; it has been seriously considered in Germany whether bodies might not be encrusted in cement and placed in a cement sarcophagus and cement in a fluid state poured about it, and all for no better purpose than to find some method of delaying the inevitable, decomposition, of delaying the devolvement of the body into its ultimate constituents which the laws of nature demand, the vegetable kingdom requires and God himself has willed.

Seeing then that it is appointed that all must die, and that dust to dust sooner or later is the inevitable destiny of the body, whether buried in the ground, or deposited in the ocean, or hid

away in the cave, or desiccated by the heat, or placed upon the hill top, or in the tower of silence, for the birds of the air, or exposed to the beasts of the fields, or piled in a huacas, or burned by fire, or surrounded by the stony sarcophagus, or embalmed' in all the balsams of the Orient, with all the cunning and knowledge of the Egyptians, is it not then wise and reasonable to dispose of the body in the manner that its decomposition will be the least injurious to the living? The decomposition of animal matter on the surface of, or a few feet under the surface of the earth, in the air or water, is accompanied by odors that are repulsive and horrible, and by gases and micro-organisms that are deadly destructive to human and all animal life. Could we read the cause of every death we would learn that millions of deaths have resulted from the putrefaction of the buried dead. With the recent developments of bacteriology we have learned that micro-organisms are the causes of the acute infectious diseases, and that these insatiable destroyers of human life do not die with their victims, but infest the earth above and about the grave; they find their way to the surface, they come forth more terrible than an army with banners and are scattered broadcast on the wings of the wind and are carried to and fro by the birds of the air.

Science has taught us this lesson, and yet in obedience to superstition, to usage and to sentiment, we continue to bury our dead; we fill and surround our cities with putrefying bodies, which contaminate the air we breathe, pollute the water we drink, and poison the food we eat. The neighborhood of burial grounds is proverbial for headaches, diarrhoea and ulcerated sore throats. According to a report of the French Academy of Medicine, the putrid emanations from Pere la Chase, Montmartre and Montparnasse, have caused frightful diseases of the lungs, to which numbers of both sexes fall victims every year. It was proposed by Mr. Forcroy to analyze the foul gases evolved from bodies which had been intered in this oversaturated soil; but no grave-digger would venture to assist in its collection, because it resulted in almost sudden death if inhaled in the concentrated form near the body, and even at a distance, when diluted and diffused through the atmosphere, produced depression of the nervous system and an entire disorder of its functions. Professor Selmi, of Mantua, has lately discovered in the strata of air which has remained

during a time of calm for a certain period over a cemetery, organisms which considerably vitiate the air and which are dangerous to life. When the matter in question was injected under the skin of a pigeon, a typhus-like ailment was produced and death ensued on the third day.

According to the Hon. Dr. Playfair's report to Parliament it is stated: "In most of our church-yards the dead are harming the living by destroying the soil, fouling the air, con. taminating the water springs, and spreading the seeds of disease. I have officially inspected many church-yards and made reports on their state, which, even to re-read, make me shudder. But the later discoveries of science point more strongly to other dangers, arising still more directly from the burial of the dead. Every year records new facts identifying the causes of certain of the most familiar types of contagious diseases with the presence of minute organisms, bacteria, the absorption of which into the blood or even in some cases of the alimentary canal, suffices to reproduce the dangerous malady. One of the most deadly scourges to our race, viz, tubercular disease, is now known to be thus propagated. The poisons of scarlet fever, typhoid, small-pox, diphtheria, malignant cholera, are undoubtedly transmissible through earth from the buried body by more than one mode." The Rev. S. Long, of Calcutta, says, "that the Mahommedan cemeteries of Calcutta have long been a crying evil and the nurseries of cholera, fever and dysentery." Dr. Edmond Parks, Prof. of Military Hygiene in the British Army Medical School, in his work on hygiene, condemns severely the practice of the burial of the dead; burying in the gronmd he says, "is the most unsanitary of all the plans of disposing of the dead. The air over cemeteries is constantly contaminated and the water in the neighborhood highly impure, hence the dangers to the population in the vicinity of graveyards." Sir Henry Thompson says, "I affirm that by burning we arrive in one hour without offense or danger at the very stage of harmless result which burying requires some years to produce, but an infinity of mischief may happen by burial and none can happen by cremation. It is estimated that 32,000 deaths occur annually for every million of people; London with nearly five millions buries in and about it at least 150,000 annually, and if the body is in the process of decomposition for only about 15 years, there are about 2,250,000 in the process of putrefaction in the soil of London and its neighborhood. For this purpose

over 2,000 acres of land are in use.” The Bishop of Manchester when consecrating a cemetery said, "Here is another one hundred acres of land withdrawn from the food producing area of this country forever. Cemeteries are not only becoming a difficulty, an expense and an inconvenience, but an actual danger. I hold that the earth was made not for the dead, but for the living. No intelligent faith can suppose that any Christian doctrine is affected by the manner in which nor the time in which, this mortal body of our crumbles into dust and sees corruption." Dr. Waller Lewis in his report on excavations that had been conducted under churches in London said, that "the many phases of decay were varied, horrible and a disgrace to any civilization;" but it is needless to multiply evidence to show that in our present knowledge of the propagation of diseases to allow a body to be buried in the ground in a city is a criminal assault against the lives of citizens for which the authorities should be held responsible. Dr. Koch, the renowned bacteriologist, says, "The blood of animals dying from splenic fever may be dried and stored for years and then pulverized into a powder and still the disease germs survive with power to produce infection."

The only manner of disposing of the dead without injury to the living is by our modern scientific method of incineration. With the history of cremation as practiced by the Ancients, by the Orientals and other semi-civilized people at present, we do not propose to speak. Science has done much for the 19th century, but in no department of thought has it exhibited greater activity or made more progress than in the department, which has for its object the discovery of the causes, prevention and cure of disease. What might be called the renaissance of cremation, that is the scientific methods at present adopted in Europe and America, was inaugurated in Italy; and most of the literature on the subject is in Italian, they being the first European people to introduce it. It is only about twenty years since Italy commenced cremating and less than that since the first crematory was built in Germany, France, England or America, yet in these few years cremation has gained a firm footing in all these countries. The increase in the number of bodies that are being cremated each year is very considerable. Many Lew crematories are being built in Europe and America, and in conservative England, cremation societies and cremations are rapidly increasing. Most of the objections urged against cremation are