[Illustration]
In this country, partly because there were few places of large
population, and partly because it was an early and general tendency to
use cemeteries rather than churches, and the grounds adjacent to them,
the evils of earth-burial did not manifest themselves so soon or in so
marked a manner as in the Old World. But there were instances enough to
convince the most incredulous that a radical change must be made. Dr.
Ackerly, writing in 1822, thus describes the condition of the
burial-ground connected with Trinity Church, New York, forty years
before: "During the Revolutionary War this ground emitted pestilential
vapors, the recollection of which is not obliterated from the memory of
a number of living witnesses." In the same year, the _Commercial
Advertiser_ published an article in reference to the present evils of
earth-burial at the same place, in which it was said: "It will be
remembered that the graveyard, being above the streets on the west, and
encompassed by a massive stone wall, and the east side being on a level
with Broadway, it results that this body of earth, the surface of which
has no declivity to carry off the rain, thus becomes a great reservoir
of contaminating fluids suspended above the adjacent streets. In proof
of this, it is stated that, in a house in Thames Street, springs of
water pouring in from that ground occasioned the removal of the tenants
on account of their exceeding fetidness." At a later date, Dr. Elisha
Harris brought this telling indictment against the same place of
interment: "Trinity churchyard has been the centre of a very fatal
prevalence of cholera whenever the disease has occurred as an endemic
near or within a quarter of a mile of it. Trinity Place, west of it,
Rector Street, on its border, the streets west of Rector and the
occupants of the neighboring offices and commercial houses have suffered
severely at each visitation of the pest from 1832 to 1854." It seems
hardly necessary to add that the foregoing statements are not intended
to make the impression that there was a worse condition at the
churchyard named than at any other....
It may now be said: "Yes, this is all true, but we have changed all
that! We no longer inter our dead in churchyards or burial-grounds
within the limits of cities. We have provided cemeteries at great
distances from our cities and large centres of population, and there the
dead can do no harm."
To this the reply is easy and convincing: "that, if the dead endanger
the living when the population is dense, they certainly also endanger
them when the population is sparse. The danger is only diluted. It still
exists, and it ought to alarm us just as truly when a few are imperilled
as when many are." ...
Not to attempt to tell all that has been ascertained, it will be
sufficiently convincing to quote from Sir Henry Thompson's utterance in
the _Nineteenth Century_ in 1880: "I state, as a fact of the highest
importance, that, by burial in earth, we effectively provide--whatever
sanitary precautions are taken by ventilation and drainage, whatever
disinfection is applied after contagion has occurred--that the
pestilential germs, which have destroyed the body in question, are thus
so treasured and protected as to propagate and multiply, ready to
reappear and work like ruin hereafter for others.... Beside anthrax or
splenic fever, spores from which are notoriously brought to the surface
from buried animals below, and become fatal to the herds feeding there,
it is now almost certain that malarial diseases, notably Roman fever and
even tetanus, are due to bacteria which flourish in the soil itself. The
poisons of scarlet fever, enteric fever (typhoid), small-pox, diphtheria
and malignant cholera are undoubtedly transmissible through earth from
the buried body." That the burial of a body that contains the seeds of
zymotic disease is simply storing them for future reproduction and
destruction is amply proved by the researches of Darwin and Pasteur, of
whom the former has shown that the mould, or fertile upper layer of
superficial soil, has largely acquired its character by its passage
through the digestive tract of earth-worms; and the latter that this
mould, when brought by this agency to the surface from subjacent soil
that has been used as a grave, contains the specific germ of the disease
that has destroyed its tenant.
It may now be asked: "Granting that these evils are inseparable from the
burial of the dead in the earth or in tombs, what is the remedy? What
else can be done?"
To this question not many answers can be given, because the modes of
disposing of the dead have always been and must always be few.
Plainly, no such novel mode as casting the dead into the sea will be
generally adopted. Plainly, also, the mode of the Parsees, grounded as
it is in ancient, if not original use--to give the dead to beasts and
birds--will not become universal. And, plainly also, cremation will not
be welcome to the many, free as it is from objection on the score of
public health, if a method equally sanitary, and at the same time
satisfactory to a reverent and tender sentiment, can be devised.
The inquiry, then, has reached its limit; for, apart from the modes that
have just been named, there are no others but earth-burial and
entombment, and earth-burial, as we have seen, cannot be made sanitary
under common conditions. Therefore, if the demands of affection and
sanitation are both to be met, entombment is to do it, or it cannot be
done.
Happily, better than any other method of disposing of the dead that has
ever been devised, entombment has met the demand of affection. Never has
any other mode so commended itself to men as this. There may have been
at times a general adoption of cremation, and there may have been a
general prevalence of earth-burial, but the one has not long satisfied
the sorrowing survivors, and the other has owed its beginning and
continuance to the apparent absence of alternative. Wherever the living
have been able, and the dead have been dearly loved or highly esteemed,
the tendency to entomb and not to bury has been constantly manifested.
To call attention to this tendency is enough to prove it, so easily
accessible is the evidence and so familiar is its operation in the human
heart. The most natural reference will be, first, to the mausoleum, the
tomb of Mausolus, that was erected by his sorrowing Queen, Artemisia, at
Halicarnassus, upon the Ægean's eastern shore, and that became at once
one of the few great wonders of the ancient world. This was intended to
do honor to the loved and illustrious dead, and this it did as no grave
or pyre could do. This was also intended to protect the lifeless form
from ruthless robbery and reckless profanation, and it performed this
task so well that for near two thousand years no human eye beheld the
mortal part of Mausolus, and no human hand disturbed its rest. At a far
earlier time, Abraham, the Father of the Faithful, while he illustrated
this tendency to entomb the dead, also offered an influential example to
all who would do him reverence, as, in the hour of his great sorrow, he
sought the seclusion and the security of Machpelah's cave for the last
earthly resting-place of his beloved wife. There he buried Sarah; there
he and his son and his son's son and their wives were all laid to rest,
and the place of their repose hath not been violated even at this
distant day. To this constant tendency constant testimony is borne by
the massive and magnificent tombs in which India abounds, the tombs and
pyramids that make marvellous the land of the Nile, the tombs that stood
thick upon the Appian Way, and that rose superb upon the Tiber's shore,
the modern use to which the Pantheon is put, the Panthéon at Paris and
the Crypt of the Invalides, the Abbey of Westminster, matchless in
memorials, the sepulchres within the hills that gird Jerusalem, and the
sepulchre in which the Nazarene was gently laid when His agony was
ended.
It remains to be considered whether entombment can be made sanitary. If
it can be the problem is solved, for entombment has ever been the best
that the living could do for their dead, and, with the added advantage
of promoting, or ceasing to be prejudicial to, the public health
entombment will be the choice of all whom cost or caprice does not
deter.
That entombment can be made sanitary is evident from the fact that in
countless instances, in many lands and through long periods of time, it
has been made sanitary by the ingenuity of man or by unassisted nature;
and it is also evident from the fact that decomposition and disease
germs are the dangers to be guarded against, and that against these both
ancient and modern science have been able to guard. Not to enumerate all
the modes that have been chanced upon or that have been devised by men,
there are two that have been notable and are available for modern
use--embalming and desiccation.
It is a delusion to imagine that embalming is a lost art; that, like
some other marvels of the ancient time, this is a secret process that
perished with the people who employed it. Did we desire it, we could
embalm our princes and our priests, and retain their shrunken
similitudes for distant coming times to gaze and gape upon, as skilfully
as they who practised this art in Egypt's palmiest days. Nay, it is
doubtless far within the truth to claim that better than they did we
could do; and we are actually apprised of better methods and results
than they employed or could attain, and it is not unlikely that we
shall hear of better methods still. But Egypt's method, or its modern
counterpart, will hardly now be popular. It involves too much mutilation
and too much transformation. When it has done its work little is left
but bone and muscular tissue, and these are so transfused with foreign
substances that a form moulded from plastic matter or sculptured from
stone could almost as truly be considered that of the lamented dead as
this. Moreover, indefinite preservation of the dead is not desirable,
and is not desired. The uses to which the Egyptian Pharaohs and their
humbler subjects have been put in these days of indelicacy and
unscrupulousness in the pursuit of science or sordid gain are not such
as to make many eager to be preserved for a similar disposition when the
present shall have become a similarly distant past.
Desiccation, in striking contrast with embalming, is the process of
nature rather than of art, and involves no mutilation and no
substitution of foreign substances for human flesh, and does not by
unnatural means preserve the semblance of the human form so long that a
susceptible sentiment is shocked and a due return of material humanity
to the elements that gave it birth prevented. Desiccation is so far a
natural process that it seems not to have been thought of until nature
had done the work and shown the product, and through many centuries, and
upon an extensive scale, nature had employed the process before it
occurred to man to copy her and adopt her method for the disposition of
his dead.
Wherever the air that enwrapped the lifeless form of man or beast was
dry, desiccation anticipated and prevented decomposition. In deserts,
upon elevated plains, upon the slopes of lofty mountain ranges, to which
the winds that passed their summits bore no moisture, the dead have not
decayed, but have dried undecomposed. In the morgue attached to the
Hospice of St. Bernard, the dead, lifted too late from their shroud of
snow, and borne thither to await the recognition of their friends, dry,
and do not decay. In the "Catacombs" of the monastery of the Capuchins
at Palermo, and in the "Bleikeller" at Bremen, the same phenomenon has
appeared. Even Egypt is a confirmation of these statements, for it is
probable that, had much less care been taken to preserve the dead, they
would not there have yielded to decay as in other lands; and that
moisture is so far absent from the atmosphere that the dead would have
been preserved from decay by desiccation had not embalming been resorted
to. Upon the elevated Western plains of this continent, the bodies of
beasts and men by thousands have been preserved from decomposition by
desiccation. To take one instance out of many that might be cited: A
cave was not long ago discovered high up among the Sierra Madre
Mountains, within which were found, where they had rested undisturbed
for many years, the lifeless figures of a little aboriginal household,
dried and undecayed. Father, mother, son and daughter, one by one, as
death had overtaken them, had been brought thither, bound so as to keep
in death the attitude that had marked them when at their rest in life,
and there they bore their silent but impressive witness to the
beneficent action of the unmoist air that had stayed decay and kept them
innocuous to the living that survived them. In Peru, instances of this
simple, wholesome process abound on almost every side; upon the elevated
plains and heights, as also beside the sea, the dead of Inca lineage,
with the lowliest of their subjects, are found in uncounted numbers,
testifying that in their death they did not injure the living, because
desiccation saved them from decomposition; and a recent traveller has
vividly described the scene that a battlefield of the late war presents,
and that illustrates the same process, where, though years have passed
since the last harsh sound of strife was heard, the fierce and bitter
combatants still seem eager to rush to conflict or to sink reluctant
into the embrace of death. And all these instances furnish conclusive
proof that decomposition can be controlled, and that its loathsome and
unwholesome transformations can be prevented, if only the simple
conditions are secured that have already so extensively effected this
result. That these conditions can be secured no one can doubt, for,
every-day, in almost every clime, by processes familiar and available to
man, the atmosphere has moisture added to it or taken from it; and the
extraction of the moisture from a portion of the atmosphere is all that
is required to introduce the process of Peruvian desiccation into the
sepulchres of Chicago or New York.
It will naturally be further asked: "Is this all that has been done to
demonstrate the efficiency and availability of desiccation for the
dead?" To this the answer would be sufficient that the evidence that has
been adduced is ample, and that, at once, in perfect confidence as to
the result, mausoleums might be erected, with provision for the
withdrawal of the moisture from the atmosphere, and for the passage of
the desiccated air through the sepulchres in which the dead should rest.
So little is involved, and so much has been accomplished without the
application of any human skill, that it seems inevitable that, as soon
as the resources of modern architecture and sanitary science are drawn
upon, the desired result will be at once attained. But, to make
assurance doubly sure, several carefully-conducted experiments have been
made, under the supervision of the directors of the New Mausoleum
movement, that prove that the conditions of desiccation can be
controlled and that decomposition can be prevented, that where it has
begun it can be stayed, and that prolonged preservation, with a fair
approximation to the appearance in life, can be made sure for the
recognition of absent friends, for transportation or the furtherance of
the ends of justice.
When, now, it is added that desiccation has been ascertained to be an
efficient agent in the destruction of disease germs, as proved by the
experiments of Dr. Sternberg, of the Hoagland Laboratory, and by the
investigations of other experts, enough seems to have been said to
establish the truth of the assertion that entombment can be made
sanitary, and that, therefore, entombment offers the satisfactory
solution of the problem how to dispose of the dead so as to do no
violence to a reverent and tender sentiment, and at the same time not to
imperil the public health.
The proposition, then, soon to be submitted for public approval is this:
to erect in the suburbs of our large towns and cities, perhaps even in
their most thickly-populated parts, extensive and handsome edifices that
will provide sanitary Sepulchres for the dead. To be comparatively
inexpensive, they will have to be comparatively plain, and it seems not
too much to hope that our cities will soon adopt this mode of disposing
of the dead that depend upon the public care for burial, and that the
horrors of a "Potter's Field," of which it cannot be divested, even in a
fair and sea-girt isle, may be forevermore unknown of men....
Within there would be, as the unit of construction, each sepulchre so
constructed that anhydrous air could enter, or could be made to enter
and withdraw, laden with moisture and morbific matter, which it would
convey to a separate structure, where a furnace would complete the
sanitary work that the anhydrous air had begun, and return to the
external atmosphere nothing that would be noxious. Each sepulchre, in
itself and its surroundings, would appear to provide a place of repose,
and would have electrical appliances attached to it for the instant
indication of the return of consciousness to any who had been
prematurely entombed, and would promise and provide the most perfect and
permanent protection against intrusion or theft that can be found on
earth. In arrangement these sepulchres would have to conform to the
price paid and the taste of the purchaser. Many would be like the single
graves that thickly ridge portions of our cemeteries; many more would be
grouped together after the semblance of a family-tomb; but in the
general impression, in the surroundings and suggestions, the resemblance
to the provisions of a cemetery would go no farther. For here there
could be no burning sun, no chilling cold, no inclement storm; for the
living, as they should pay the last sad honor to the dead, or in any
subsequent tribute of affection, there could be no exposure, and for the
dead there would be only the constant semblance of the comfort and the
quiet of the best-ordered and most tranquil home. Thus, in providing the
utmost that exacting affection and sanitary science can require, and in
taxing to the utmost the resources of art, in architecture, in sculpture
and in the use of subdued and according hues and forms for appropriate
decoration, these "Campo Santos," or "Mausoleums," or "Mansions of the
Dead," will seem to have realized the ideal disposition of the mortal
remains of those who depart this life.