The disposal of the dead : a plea for legislation, and a protest against cremation / by Francis Seymour Haden.

  • Haden, Francis Seymour, 1818-1910.
Date:
[1888?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The disposal of the dead : a plea for legislation, and a protest against cremation / by Francis Seymour Haden. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    a necessity — escaped observation, or at best, was but imperfectly recognised. Yet it is this retention of the dead in the dwelling-house, if only for one day beyond the time prescribed by nature, which is the head and front of our error, as it is also the cause of all our difficulties ; since it is that retention which necessitates the strong coffin, and the strong coffin again which prevents the resolution which it is the office of the earth to accomplish and which it should be the first care of the living to promote. This is but a simple sequence of simple ideas, and yet I know not how this necessary sequence, simple as it is, is ever to be brought home to, and practically applied by, the common under- standing, without the aid of legal prescription. I shall, therefore, have to return to the subject. Meantime, the object of keeping the body unburied, though arising partly no doubt from an indisposition not wholly unnatural to part with it, is yet, I imagine, chiefly to gain time to summon friends from a distance to attend it to the grave, and to prepare the customary mourning against the day of the funeral. But are these reasonable objects ? The dead body being what it is—what we see it to be by the changes going on in it—can such an indulgence, the terrible cost considered, be reasonably defended ? Frankly, I think not, or rather I should think not if I believed we were aware of the full consequences of such indulgence. It is here, therefore—with this moral cause—that the clergy who have already done such good work in encouraging modera- tion and in discouraging those minor errors in the direction of excess which arise out of a sincere but wholly mistaken desire to do honour to the dead, can be of most use. It is they who on the occasion of a death, especially in small communities, have the readiest access to the ear of the survivor, and who can best explain to him what, as a good citizen, he ought and what he ought not to do. I beg pardon, however, for these reflections, and return at once to that part of the subject which more properly belongs to me. And here, it occurs to me, I may perhaps disarm the prejudice which shrinks from exposing the bodies of the dead to an actual contact with the earth if I describe in popular terms what that friendly contact means. Some curiously mistaken notions exist as to what happens to a dead body when, in the words of the old ritual, it is laid into the ground, the common notion being that it becomes a part of that clay to