Cholera and its cures : an historical sketch / by J. Stevenson Bushnan.

  • Bushnan, J. Stevenson (John Stevenson), 1808?-1884.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cholera and its cures : an historical sketch / by J. Stevenson Bushnan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    privy; in another there was a quantity of old bricks and mortar; in a third there was an unclosed grave, which, although it had already received five or six coffins, was only covered over with a few boards, and some handfuls of earth strewed upon them, and was therefore ready to receive more coffins before being entirely shut; while in the remaining corner, over a compai-a- tively recent grave, was to be seen a neatly-kept little mound carefully hooped over to keep the earth together, and presenting a sad and painful spectacle, by the very contrast of it decency to the grossly neglected state of the rest of this ground. 3. But of all the graveyards the north one is immeasurably the worst in every respect. A person can scarcely believe that it could ever have been used as a place of sepulture. It forms a long narrow strip, not above ten or twelve feet in width, between the walls of the church on one side, and the rears of some old dirty houses in Cloth-fair, which in some parts overhang the ground, on the other. To a stranger it has all the appearance of a filthy back yard common to several low and filthy houses. The surface is strewed with cabbage-leaves, parings of turnips, fish-bones, and other sorts of rubbish, with large splashes of filthy water that had been recently emptied from some adjacent window. There is a large pile of hen-coops at one end, and a couple of dog-kennels at another part. Upon inquiring to whom they belonged, the schoolmaster of the parochial schools informed me that they were his pro- perty, adding that the management of the ground had been left by the churchwardens in his hands for the last three or four years, and that he made use of it as a convenient place to keep his fowls in. At the present season of the year, he said, it did not look nice; but in summer the grass grew quite beautifully! Before his time, the graveyard, he told me, was in a horrible state, and not fit to be entered by any one, being ankle-deep in many places with excrement which had been thrown out from the houses in Cloth-fair, and no better than a common dung-yard. Yet then, or at least not very long before, it was the pauper burial-ground for the parish ; and that multitudes of human corpses have been thrust into it is sufficiently evident from the great rising of the ground, by many feet, above the level of the adjacent court. It must indeed have been a shocking spectacle to have witnessed the mockery of a Christian funeral here. No one would bury a favourite dog in such a spot. I have not seen anything called a graveyard so thoroughly disgust- ing and so revolting to every sentiment of common decency, not to mention religion, as this ground; nor did I ever leave a place where I knew that my fellow-creatures had been laid with feelings of such indignant regret. Burial-ground, Wade-street, All Saints, Poplar.—The officiating clergyman, the Rev. James Hearsnep, admitted that foul smells were per- ceptible from the open graves; but stated that, in his opinion, the smells were attributable not so much to the decomposition of the bodies that were therein deposited, as to the escape underneath the intervening wall of the contents of the 2^rivies of those houses into the (/raves. He himself had good reason to suspect that this had been the case on more than one occasion.