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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    could do as the Greeks and Romans did at one period of their history, and make our dwelling-houses the repositories of the funeral urns. I must not be understood as advocating any of these methods of preservation. I merely say that any one of them, or all of them, could be pursued without entail- ing evil results upon the living. Personally I am not in favor of any preservation of the ashes. These should, in my opinion, be returned to nature as quickly as possible, just as is of necessity the case with the vola- tile elements of the physical structure. In order to per- form her work in an effectual manner, nature requires that all her forces be utilized. If she be deprived of any portion of that which is hers she must be, to a greater or less extent, crippled in her operations, and the inevi- table corollary to that is that we, as parts of the great integrity, must be crippled too. As Euclid has pre- sented us with the mathematical axiom: The whole is equal to the sum of all its parts, so may we pro- pound, as a social axiom, that an injury or a benefit to the whole is equal to the sum of the injuries or bene- fits to all the parts. In other words, no injury or bene- fit can be sustained by the whole without each and every part having to bear its proportional share of such injury or benefit. Some persons tell us seriously that, whatever objec- tions may be brought against burial, they cannot accept cremation as a substitute because it is of heathen ori- gin. Outside of Judaism, I find it difficult to discover anything that, prior to the advent of Christianity, was not of heathen origin. It might as well be said to-day that the photograph and the phonograph are of Chris- tian origin; that steam and electricity, as sources of heat and light and power, are Christian discoveries; or that twelve and fourteen story buildings, which are a menace to the limbs and lives of all who dwell in