Interment and disinterment : a further exposition of the practices pursued in the metropolitan places of sepulture, and the results as affecting the health of the living : in a series of letters to the editor of the Morning Herald / by G.A. Walker.

Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Interment and disinterment : a further exposition of the practices pursued in the metropolitan places of sepulture, and the results as affecting the health of the living : in a series of letters to the editor of the Morning Herald / 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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    of course the injury to the vital Junctions must necessarily be proportionably PTPflt f*l* Are, then, the gases evolved from the decomposition of human bodies similar- identical in their composition—with the air we breathe, or are they dissimilar ; and, it dissimilar, are they harmless in their nature, or deleterious? The disgusting and offensive smell teaches us that something in addition to the usual components of the atmosphere is present. The facts which I shall adduce, elucidating their effects on the animal economy, apart from their known chemical constitution and properties, will most clearly and incontestibly prove, that these gases arc by no means innocuous, but on the contrary, powerfully and virulently poisonous. The proximate princi- ples, or the constituents of which our frame is composed, are for the most part ex- ceedingly complex as regards their elementary composition. They are formed in the grand laboratory of nature. The most skilful chemists have never hitherto succeeded in producing them by art. They were originally generated, and their integrity is constantly preserved by a mysterious something, which we denominate the vital principle, or life. When this conservative power is wanting, when life ceases, they fall under the dominion of the immutable, the general, laws governing inorganic mat- ter, resolve themselves into simpler compounds, and are arranged, usually, according to their chemical affinities. The compounds generated are for the most part gaseous sub- stances, viz., sulphuretted, carburetted, and phosphuretted hydrogen, ammonia and its hydro-sulphuret, carbonic acid, and sometimes nitrogen and hydrogen, holding a considerable quantity of a peculiar volatile fatty matter in suspension, or solution. Some of these gases when respired are known, and have repeatedly been proved, to produce disease, and even death. The greatest obstacle in the way of the honest and anxious inquirer after truth, is the difficulty of collecting sound data. The causes of disease are frequently as mysterious as the sources of life; direct evidence is too often wanting. Thus for centuries past we have been disputing whether certain diseases are contagious or non-contagious, almost forgetting that compared with the investigation of their origin, that of their transmission is comparatively unimportant. It is true, that so far as we are acquainted with the subject, we are generally unable to collect other than presumptive evidence; but, when the presumptions are founded in so much pro- bability, and the facts from which we deduce them are of so frequent occurrence, the effects so constantly and so surely following the apparent cause, we cannot do otherwise than reason upon and decide from the evidence we possess, imputing the absence of more direct testimony not to its non-existence, but to the want of a suffi- cient observation in those who, instead of being carried away by the judgment of other men, have exercised their own, in watching the operations of Nature, and in attending to the silent, but not less certain, warning which she gives to those who infringe even the most minute of her laws. The page of history is studded with instances of individual and national suffering which, if not always clearly traceable to the neglect of certain principles, may yet, in the absence of more direct evidence, serve to remind us of the past as cautions for the future. If we give two persons a dose of a deleterious substance, and it pro- duces death in both, we have direct evidence that it is a poison ; but if two persons are exposed to a vitiated atmosphere, and illness be produced in the one and not in the other, we have presumptive evidence only that the atmosphere acts as an agent in the production of such disease. This kind of proof becomes, of course, stronger, and approaches more nearly to the nature of direct evidence, as the proportion attacked in a given number is larger, supposing the intensity of the poison to be the same in each case. Thus, if ten persons out of a hundred be attacked after being exposed to the same causes of disease, the evidence is stronger than if five only suffered. If the proportion be twenty, the evidence is yet stronger ; if thirty, stronger still; and so until what was before presumptive, becomes direct, evidence, the one merging into the other as the number attacked becomes greater. But there are a multitude of accidental circumstances which preclude the possi- bility of direct evidence of this kind ever being obtained in our investigations into the remote causes of disease—as for instance idiosyncracies, or natural and inexpli- cable peculiarities of constitution, varying states of mind or body, and last, though not least, atmospheric influences. There are individuals who enjoy a complete im- munity from diseases of the endemic or epidemic class, who, however much exposed to disease in its most intense form, yet escape uninjured, and who would be alike safe amid the milder epidemics of England and the fearful desolation of the plague. Who does not know that a man in perfect health is less liable to contagion than one