A quartercentury of cremation in North America ; being a report of progress in the United States and Canada for the last quarter of the nineteenth century; to which have been added, as an afterthought, a few words about the advance in Europe during the same period.

  • Cobb, John Storer.
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A quartercentury of cremation in North America ; being a report of progress in the United States and Canada for the last quarter of the nineteenth century; to which have been added, as an afterthought, a few words about the advance in Europe during the same period. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    allowed to depart until it had witnessed the erection of a crematorium, and seen the incineration of a body within the cemetery grounds. The year 1887 found the State of New York grap- pling with the problem of contagious and infectious diseases. The quarantine burial-ground on Staten Island had for a long time been an object of dread and suspicion among those who resided in its vicinity. Opposition to its further use as a repository for the dead now assumed a form and character which com- pelled its recognition. The Legislature of 1888 passed an act authorizing the erection of a public crematory for disposing of the bodi'es of those who died in the public hospital of such distempers. This was con- structed upon Swinburne Island, not'far from New York City. For a period of three years it was not much used, but in 1892 the whole country was agi- tated by a threatened invasion of cholera, and the bodies of sixty immigrants were incinerated. Since 1893 the average yearly number of bodies cremated here has been but three; and it is to be hoped that, for its original purpose, there may be little demand for its further service. The year 1890 saw the con- struction, at Troy, in the same State, of the most costly structure devoted to this purpose in our land. It is erected as a memorial to an only son, and stands within a cemetery to which it has been made a gift by its founders, for the reception of whose ashes pro- vision has been made, so that for all that is left of the parents a final resting place may be secured by the side of the remains of their departed child. During the same year an appliance was fabricated in Phila-