Gatherings from grave yards : particularly those of London : with a concise history of the modes of interment among different nations, from the earliest periods. And a detail of dangerous and fatal results produced by the unwise and revolting custom of inhuming the dead in the midst of the living / by G.A. Walker.

Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gatherings from grave yards : particularly those of London : with a concise history of the modes of interment among different nations, from the earliest periods. And a detail of dangerous and fatal results produced by the unwise and revolting custom of inhuming the dead in the midst of the living / by G.A. Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    who, like living spectres, or the personifications of hopeless misery, of incurable disease, and too fre- quently of reckless conduct, are crawling about our streets, spreading contamination around, presenting centres of infection morally and physically in their own persons, and appealing in the most forcible manner to our sympathies—sternly demanding, if they are men, whether we are Christians ? What a magnificent field for exertion is here pre- sented ! If, instead of directing the eleemosynary contributions of the middle and lower classes, and the liberal donations of the rich, into foreign chan- nels of usefulness, it were the fashion to irrigate our own soil with that stream, that quality of mercy that blesseth him that gives, and him that takes, how happy might we not be, how contented our poor, how firm in their affections to those above them in station !—then our women and men (some of the causes of their physical and moral degradation being removed) would become better mothers, better husbands, better members of the family of which they form so large a proportion ! It is demonstrable that the centres of infection are found principally in crowded neighbourhoods, and a vitiated atmosphere; here they are propagated and nourished by the action and re-action, the