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Mark Twain > Life On The Mississippi > Chapter 42

Life On The Mississippi

Chapter 42


                         Hygiene and Sentiment

THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults
have a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built
of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely;
they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one
moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their
white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand,
the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him.
Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order.
When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it,
to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there
would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead,
they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would
be the wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers,
in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults:
placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children,
husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow finds
its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly
but indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or some
such emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow
rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowful
breast-pin, so to say. The immortelle requires no attention:
you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will take
care of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can;
stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron.

On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--
creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies. Their changes
of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation.
They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle;
but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that.

I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been
trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it,
but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely
sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.
Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages,
when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground,
to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with
disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die
before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now,
when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon
a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth
closes over his corpse. It is a grim sort of a thought.
The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteen
hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.
But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics,
within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial,
MADE several thousand people sick. Therefore these
miracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more.
St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true;
but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years,
and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all;
and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all.
Where you find one that pays--like St. Anne--you find
a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute.
And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--
they pay none of the interest either simple or compound.
A Saint can never QUITE return the principal, however;
for his dead body KILLS people, whereas his relics HEAL only--
they never restore the dead to life. That part of the account is
always left unsettled.

'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote:
"The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases,
results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters,
with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with
the SPECIFIC germs of the diseases from which death resulted."

'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface
through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do,
and there is practically no limit to their power of escape.

'During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton
reported that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred
and fifty-two per thousand--more than double that of any other.
In this district were three large cemeteries, in which during
the previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried.
In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to
aggravate the disease.

'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance
of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where,
THREE HUNDRED YEARS PREVIOUSLY, the victims of the pestilence had
been buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics,
remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted
in an immediate outbreak of disease.'--NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, NO.
3, VOL. 135.

In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation,
Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden
is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:--

'One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals in
the United States than the Government expends for public-school purposes.
Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilities
of all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year,
and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business.
Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined
gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880!
These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds
and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation
of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.'

For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial;
for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly
and ostentatious as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor,
cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap[Four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]>--so cheap until
the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do
by-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck
of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand,
it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes
that have had a rest for two thousand years.

I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy
manual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year,
and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping
is necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless.
To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I was
writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child.
He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that
was within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find,
plain wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have cost
less than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into.
He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months.

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