296 CREMATION AS A SANITARY MEASURE. 



and the life-giving springs. We even dare to preserve 

 in the earth vast storehouses of yellow fever fo mites, 

 coffers of Asiatic cholera, and every year accumulate 

 and treasure up small-pox, scarlet fever, whooping 

 cough, diphtheria and measles. The sanitary records 

 of every nation give point and force to this question, and 

 illustrate this danger. Dr. J. Lewis Smith, of New York, 

 mentions the case of a grave-digger who contracted and 

 died from diphtheria, from having disinterred the re- 

 mains of a person who had died from this disease twenty- 

 three years before. In 1828 Prof. Bianchi, of Italy, 

 demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of the Plague 

 at Modena was caused by excavations in the ground 

 where, three hundred years before, the victims of the 

 pestilence had been buried. It has been fully demon- 

 strated that the opening of a plague burial-ground in 

 Derbyshire, England, occasioned an immediate outbreak 

 of the disease. The same writer proved that the cholera 

 epidemic which scourged London in 1854 could be traced 

 to the excavations made for sewers in the soil where the 

 .bodies of those dying from plague were buried in 1665, 

 two hundred years before. 



As eminent an authority as Sir Lyon Playfair regards 

 Roman fever as resulting from the exhalations of soil 

 saturated with organic remains. In 1843, while rebuild- 

 ing an old parish church at Minchinhampton, England, 

 the superfluous soil of the burial ground was distributed 

 as a fertilizer in many of the neighboring gardens. As a 

 result the town was nearly decimated. In 1828, when 

 the plague broke out in Egypt and over 2,000 died in 

 Kelioub and even more in Cairo, the French government 

 instituted a special investigation and traced the evil to 

 the digging up of a disused burial-ground. We seldom 

 take any very great pains to discover the origin of local 

 diseases unless they assume a malignant or .epidemic 

 type, and it is quite safe to assume that many thousands 



234: 



