CREMATION chief provisions have been carefully considered by the Council of the Society, and the regulations necessary for registration ot death and the disposal of the dead may be outlined as follows 1. That no body should be buried, cremated, or otherwise disposed of without a medical certificate of death signed, after personal knowledge and observation, or by information obtained after investigation made by a qualified medical officer appointed for the purpose. I A qualified medical man should be appointed as official certifier in every parish, or district of neighbouring parishes, his duty being to inquire into all cases of death and report the cause in writing, together with such other details as may be deemed necessary. °This would naturally fall within the duties of the medical officer of health for the district, and registration should be made at his office. 3. If the circumstances of death obviously demand a coroner’s inquest, the case should be transferred to his court and the cause determined, with or without autopsy. If there appears to be no ground for holding an inquest, and autopsy be necessary to the furnishing of a certificate, the official ceitifiei should make it, and state the result in his report. 4. No person or company should be henceforth permitted to construct or use an apparatus for cremating human bodies without licence from the Local Government Board or other authority. 5. No crematory should be so employed unless the site, construction, and system of management have been approved after survey by an officer appointed by Government for the purpose. But the licence to construct or use a crematory should not be withheld if guarantees are given that the conditions required are or will be complied with. All such crematories to be subject at all times to inspection by an officer appointed by the Government. 6. The burning of a human body, otherwise than in an officially recognized crematory, should be illegal, and punishable by penalty. 7. No human body should be cremated unless the official examiner added the words “ Cremation permitted.” This he should be bound to do if, after due inquiry, he can certify that the deceased has died fiom natural causes, and not from ill-treatment, poison, or violence. Undoubtedly in populous communities and in crowded districts the burial of dead bodies is liable to be a source of danger to the living. As early as 1840 a Commission had been appointed, including some of the earliest authorities on sanitary science,—namely, Drs Southwood Smith, Chadwick, Milroy, Sutherland, Waller Lewis, and others,— to conduct a searching inquiry into the state of the burialgrounds of London and large provincial towns. By the report1 the existence of such a danger was strikingly demonstrated, and intramural interments were . in consequence made illegal. The advocates of burial then declared that interment in certain light soils would safely and efficiently decompose the putrefying elements which begin to be developed the moment death takes place, and which rapidly become dangerous to the living, still more so in the case of deaths from contagious disease. But these light dry soils and elevated spots are precisely those best adapted for human habitation; to say nothing of their value for food-production. Granted the efficiency of such burial, it only effects in the course of a few years what exposure to a high temperature accomplishes with absolute safety in an hour. In a densely populated country the struggle between the claims of the dead and the living to occupy the choicest sites becomes a serious matter. All decaying animal remains give off effluvia—gases which are transferred through the medium of the atmosphere to become converted into vegetable growth of some kind — trees, crops, garden produce, grass, &c. Every plant absorbs these gases by its leaves, each one of which is provided with hundreds of stomata—open mouths— by which they fix or utilize the carbon to form woody fibre, and give off free oxygen to the atmosphere. Thus it is that the air we breathe is kept pure by the constant interaction between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. It may be taken as certain that the gaseous products arising from a cremated body—amounting, although invisible, to no less than 97 per cent, of its weight, 3 per 1 A Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns, by Edwin Chadwick (London, 1843), is replete with evidence, and should be read by those who desire to pursue the inquiry further.
269
cent, only remaining as solids, in the form of a pure white ash—become in the course of a few hours integral and active elements in some form of vegetable life. Ihe result of this reasoning has been that, by slow degrees, crematoria have been constructed at many of the populous cities in Great Britain and abroad. In Manchester a large one was opened in 1892, in Glasgow in 1894, in Liverpool in 1896, in Hull in 1899. In Birmingham another is in progress of formation. The subject of employing cremation for the bodies of those who die of contagious disease is a most. important one. Sir H. Thompson advocated this course in a paper read before the International Congress of Hygiene held in London in 1891; and a resolution strongly approving the practice was carried unanimously at a large meeting of experts and medical officers of health. Such diseases are small - pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, consumption, malignant cholera, enteric, relapsing, and puerperal fevers, the annual number of deaths from which in the United Kingdom is upwards of 80,000. Complete disinfection takes place by means of the high temperature to which the body is exposed. Heated air suffices, and the chamber of a Siemens regenerative gas-furnace, where no flame enters, is the most perfect form for accomplishing the process. It will probably, at no distant period, supersede the furnaces now employed. At the present day it is compulsory to report any case in the foregoing list, whenever it occurs, to the medical officer of health for the district; and it is customary to disinfect the rooms themselves, as well as the clothes and furniture used by the patient if the case be fatal; but the body, which is the source and origin of the evil, and is itself loaded with the germs of a specific poison, is left to the chances which attach to its preservation in that condition, when buried in a fit or unfit soil or situation. The process of preparing a body for cremation requires a brief notice. The plan generally adopted is to place it (in the usual shroud) in a light 'pine shell, discarding all heavy oak or other coffin, and to introduce it into the furnace in that manner. For the purpose of transit such a shell is convenient and appropriate ; but it is best to discard the linen shroud—the combustion of which, together with the shell, produces a quantity of black charcoal, which has subsequently to be separated, not without some trouble, from the white ashes of the body—in favour of one of a stout woollen material; this, being an animal product, is destroyed and dissipated by cremation, and is so made that the body may be easily cremated without the shell. A sheet of flannel is provided, say 10 feet by 5 or 6 feet for an adult of average size, in which the body is placed ; the sides of the sheet are then to be folded across the body, one overlapping the other, so as to cover it entirely. Thus the folded ends of the sheet will extend some 2 feet or so above and below the head and feet of the body respectively. Above each of these points a piece of stout wide strong tape or web should be firmly tied round the folded sheet, and in at least two places round the covered body also, so as to maintain the sheet in situ. These ends are then turned over when the body has been placed in the shell, before the lid is adjusted for removal. Immediately before the act of cremation commences, the shell should be opened, the body be carefully and reverently lifted out by a bearer at each end of the sheet, a third supporting the centre, and be placed on the frame which enters the crematorium. The following statistics show the history of modem cremation and its progress at home and abroad to the present date:— Foreign Countries.—The first experiment in Italy was made by Brunetti in 1869, his second and third in 1870. _ Gorini arid Bolli published their first cases in 1872. Brunetti exhibited his at Vienna in 1873. All were performed in the open air. The next in Europe was a single case at Breslau in 1874. Soon after, an English lady was cremated in a closed apparatus (Siemens) at Dresden. The next cremation in a closed receptacle took place at • Milan in 1876. In the same year a Cremation Society was lormea, a handsome building was erected, and two Gorini furnaces were at work in 1880. In 1899 the total number of cremations was 1355. Other crematoria were subsequently erected at Lodi, Cremona, Brescia, Bologna, Varese, Padua, and Venice. At Bologna the total
