Hugo Erichsen

“ BURIAL ALIVE.—CREMATION FROM AN ÆSTHETIC AND RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW. Our great American poet, Edgar Allan Poe, says: “To be buried alive is beyond question the most terrific of all extremes which have ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.”
Is any death more horrible than this? To be embraced, unprepared, down in the deep dark grave! To awake again with the greatest longing for life, suffering the most severe bodily tortures, in the coffin! To realize that there is no escape from inevitable death! ”

“ In the words of the learned rector of the University of Padua, Professor Coletti: “Man should disappear and not rot; he should no more be transformed into a mass of corruption—the source of filthy and injurious exhalations—than into a grotesque mummy, a shapeless mixture of pitch, resin, and perfumes; man should become a handful of ashes and nothing more.”
“Would not cremation rob nature of its supply of ammonia?” ”

“ It makes no difference whether the grave we explore be that of a prime minister, upon which a magnificent monument rears its costly shaft high into the air, or that of a common criminal who tried to enjoy existence by spending three-quarters of his lifetime in prison; the result remains the same: in each we find the disgusting and sickening evidence of slow destruction,—a formless, putrid mass of flesh, and sometimes numberless revelling worms. ”

“ I rejoice at the thought that most writers on the momentous subject of incineration were medical men. Who, indeed, would be better qualified for such a task than the man who may daily witness the pernicious effect which the dead exercise over the living.
Those who are friends of the reform should come out openly in its favor. Crematists who are on the fence, or who, perhaps, hide back of it, might just as well keep out of the combat between cremation and interment altogether; we have no use for them. If you believe in cremation, candidly say so, and tell your friends why you believe in it. ”

“ When the Romans and Greeks knew better than we know, we exercise no compunction in adopting their practices. Our boys are taught from the classics; artists study the models of Greek, that is, pagan, art; much of our philosophy is heathen, and more of our jurisprudence. The ancients were wiser than we in practicing incineration. Why not, then, imitate them in this respect? Granted even that cremation were a “pagan custom,” not to adopt it when it has been conclusively demonstrated to be superior to burial, simply because it is of heathenish origin, shows nothing but miserable narrow-mindedness. ”

“ No thought of physical corruption jars upon our memories of the dead. The opening words of the speaker are said, a hidden choir harmoniously chants of hope and life, and now the end has come. With the words ‘ashes to ashes’ a white pall is thrown over the dais, and we have looked upon our friend for the last time. The dais noiselessly sinks from sight, a short hour is spent in listening to a funeral oration, or in contemplation, until the dais, still covered with the pall, rises from below. ”

“ Does it agree with our ideas of right and wrong to endanger the lives of our great-grandchildren or their offspring by our methods of disposing of the dead? For, by the time they appear on the stage of this world, the burial-ground now sanitary will have become a breeding-place of disease from overuse.
When we remove burial-grounds to a distance, we only postpone the evil. We insure our own safety, it is true, by so doing; but we encumber the ground with most virulent seeds, and leave to future generations—to those who come after us—a terrible crop of pollution, disease germs, and death. ”

“ About the Doric pillars of its portico green vines twine fondly as if they, too, would do their share in robbing death of all its hideousness. To this place loving hands have borne the body of our friend. No coffin lends its horror to the journey from this earthly home to here, where eternal sleep awaits him. A flower-strewn bier gives poetic carriage for this short and final journey. Entering the broad portal, the soft, deep notes of an organ charm the ear. The eye takes in a most imposing sight. ”

“ There is nothing repulsive in the idea of cremation. People’s prejudice is the only opponent it has. If they could be awakened to a sense of the horror of crowding thousands of bodies under the ground, to pollute in many instances the air we breathe and the water we drink, their prejudice would be overcome; cremation would be taken for what it truly is—a beautiful method of disposing of the body. The friends of the departed can do as they please with the remains. Take the ashes of a wife or daughter and put them in an urn ”

“ Often the site of an old grave is used to make a new one, and in consequence earth is brought to light that is saturated with the effluvia of corpses of those who, perhaps, have died of some contagious or infectious disease. The crime that is committed by individuals when they bury persons deceased of such maladies is pithily expressed by that champion of modern cremation, Sir Henry Thompson, who says: “Is it not indeed a social sin of no small magnitude to sow the seeds of disease and death broadcast, caring only to be certain that they cannot do much harm to our own generation?” ”

“ The darkness and the dampness of the earth have been escaped, and so have the perils of grave-snatching, the indecencies of a possible dissecting-room, and the nameless horrors of putrefaction. You have pleasant memories to cherish of the ‘last sad hour,’ which, instead of ‘breathless darkness’ and the ‘narrow house’ and the dreadful thud of falling earth upon the coffin, presents to mind a lovely bed of rosy light, and a peaceful form clad in virgin purity resting within its soft embrace. ”

“ It has been said, and most naturally, what guarantee is there against poisoning if the remains are burned, and it is no longer possible, as after burial, to reproduce the body for the purpose of examination? It is to my mind a sufficient reply that, regarding only ‘the greatest good to the greatest number,’ the amount of evil in the shape of disease and death which results from the present system of burial in earth is infinitely larger than the evil caused by secret poisoning is or could be, even if the practice of the crime were very considerably to increase. ”

“ If people could see the human body after the process of decomposition sets in, which is as soon as the vital spark ceases to exist, they would not want to be buried; they would be in favor of cremation. If they could go into a dissecting-room and see the horrid sights of the dissecting-table, they would not wish to be buried. Burying the human body, I think, is a horrible thing. If more was known about the human frame while undergoing decomposition, people would turn with horror from the custom of burying their dead. It takes a human body 50, 60, 80 years—yes, longer than that—to decay. ”

“ It is not to be wondered at, that the anatomists raise a cry of alarm, for, indeed, I know of no other method of disposal of the dead that is as damaging to their relations with the defunct as cremation. Even a professor of the Jefferson Medical College, a man who ought to have known better, joined the anti-cremationists for these reasons. Every educated person knows that a thorough knowledge of anatomy is essential to the successful practice of medicine and surgery, and that a familiarity with the internal workings of the human system can be gained in no other way under the sun. ”

“ If the charges made by the anti-cremation party were true, incineration, if established, would offer facilities for the commission and concealment of hideous crimes. A victim could be destroyed by poison, the dead body carried to a furnace and reduced to a small heap of ashes in a short space of time, and the crime thus forever placed beyond the reach of detection. The cremator, then, would become the instrument and accomplice of the murderer. It is urged that the agents employed in the commonest form of secret murder—poisoning—are often of a novel, subtle, and various character. ”

“ It is the beginning of a chemical process—a process which ends finally in the total dissolution of the corpse. The chemical constituents of our body are returned to nature. Burial and cremation are in a sense the same; in either case the body oxydates. The great distinction between the two lies in the fact, that the burning in the grave requires years for its completion, and is fraught with danger to the living, whilst in case of incineration the body is reduced to its primitive elements in the brief space of a few hours, and is unaccompanied by anything that may do harm. ”

“ People who wonder at the change that has come over our New England villages, the homes of a vigorous ancestry, and deplore the advent of this mysterious ‘malaria,’ the unseen vampire that sucks the red blood of the present 104generation, would do well to look about them and see how the graveyards, old and new, have grown in two centuries, how the town has surrounded them; how the water supply is from the same old wells; how the town, never having arrived at a magnitude seeming to demand a sewerage system, allows the refuse of generations to mingle with the surface soil. ”

“ To some persons there may be something in the idea of reducing one’s friends to ashes that is repulsive. Yet, when one makes a careful study of the question, that prejudice or repulsiveness wears away entirely, and makes way to a feeling that cremation is correct both in theory and practice. One should not listen to the emotions in a matter like this, but study incineration to be able to judge of it; objections founded on sentiment only are sure to be wrong. ”

“ From year to year, however, bodies are added to those already buried, the disgusting state of overcrowding which I described minutely, with all its evils, shows itself, and then one of two things happens: either the remains of those buried before are ruthlessly dug up by the sexton’s spade and thrown into the mud whenever a new grave is made, or all of the bodies are exhumed and taken away; the soil is parcelled, and the new generation takes possession of the “city of the dead.” ”

“ If the guardians of consecrated sepulchres, in which people have paid an honest fee to be buried, are to dig them up and cart them off as in England, or make a show of them as here, why, I can only say that cremation will gain a good many converts. Any one would prefer urn burial to the chance of being thus made a spectacle. So good, too, it must be for the rising population to take off the edge of any salutary horror they may feel at death and decay, or of reverence for the dead. ”

“ The missionaries should endeavor to do what the English in India have done and are doing still—attempt to substitute scientific incineration for the crude ancient method of burning the dead on pyres. And in this undertaking, I am sure, they would have the support of the most intelligent among the Indians. The natives of Alaska, no doubt, learned by some terrible, never-to-be-forgotten experience the dangers and evils of burial in the ground; and, although their method of obviating these dangers and evils is rude and barbaric, the principle which impelled them to adopt cremation is right. ”

“ He was to the profession of medicine what Charles O’Connor was to the profession of law, and his deliberate choice of incineration in preference to burial attracted wide and respectful attention even in so conservative a class as doctors. Perhaps no man ever drew breath who was better qualified to express an opinion on this subject. Who is so well entitled to form a correct opinion as the man who for nearly three-quarters of a century had the closest possible relations with the dying and the dead? ”

“ E. J. Bermingham of New York City hits the nail on the head by saying:—
“We believe the abhorrence entertained by many, of cremation, depends to a very great extent on the universal tendency of individuals and nations to resent any interference with established customs, to reject any innovation simply because it is an innovation.”
Sentimental objection to incineration resolves into this: We are the slaves of custom. We love to walk in the old wornout paths, and when some one discovers a new way that is much shorter, and by which the destination is reached much sooner, we are loathe to use it. ”

“ I am too firm a believer in the immortality of the soul, to view with patience the inconsistency of those who behave over the dead bodies of their friends as if the immortal part were being laid away in the ground. The more I might love my dead, the less willing I 194should be to leave the fair form that had once held an immortal spirit to turn into putrid carrion under ground, and breed a myriad of loathsome creatures out of its own rottenness. The attempt to substitute the scientific, poetical, and rational system of cremation has my earnest sympathy. ”

“ To the surprise of the sexton the coffin-lid showed signs of displacement, and on its being removed the grave-digger was horrified to find the remains turned face downward, the hand filled with long tufts of hair torn from the head, and the face, neck, and bosom deeply scratched and scarred, while the lining of the coffin had been torn into fragments in the desperate efforts of the entombed victim to escape from her horrible fate. Since the discovery the young husband has been prostrated, and his life is despaired of. ”