This very serious evil is well known to all persons who have taken an interest in the sanitary advancement of the poor; and ineffectual endeavours have been made for its diminution. The law does indeed empower your Officer of Health, under certain circumstances, to order the removal of a corpse from any inhabited room. And, under the Nuisances Removal Act, the General Board of Health may be authorised, during times of epidemic disease, to issue directions and regulations for the speedy interment of the dead. Both laws have remained inoperative, and are likely to remain so.
If one were starting anew--legislating for a people with unformed habits, nothing might be easier than to devise regulations of a perfect kind with regard to the sanitary management of the dead. But our case is widely different. The evils against which we have to contend are among the deepliest-rooted habits of the country. In defence of what exists there are many stupid and ignorant prejudices: but, interwoven with these are feelings of tenderness and affection, to which all consideration and reverence are due;--feelings which would be shocked and outraged by any abrupt endeavour to reduce the care of the dead to a system of fixed regulations.
For myself, having the deepest sense of the evil in question, and having officially the power to order the removal of the dead, I may repeat that I have never yet exercised my authority. Practically speaking, I can hardly conceive an instance in which I should attempt to do so. It would require the strongest case that could be shown of actual mischief in progress--of disease and death multiplied day by day through the presence of some particular dead body, to justify interference even in that single instance. Nothing like the operation of a general law would be tolerated;--nothing like including the dead in a compulsory plan of hygienic police.
After very careful consideration of the subject, I may confess myself even more impressed with its difficulties than when I first began to give it my attention; and in the few suggestions which follow I cannot pretend to do more than intimate where, in my opinion, a beginning may usefully be made towards an improvement which it will take many years to accomplish.