Modernity in Medicine and Hygiene at the End of the 19^th Century: The Example of Cremation

Abstract

Medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century takes on some characteristics of modernity. These characteristics are worthy of our attention because they help us to understand better some of the current problems of hygiene and public health. One of the topics that was most discussed in the scientific-academic milieu of the second half of the nineteenth century was cremation. There was a poetic precedent: the cremation of Percy Bysse Shelley (1792-1822). The earliest apparatus to completely destroy the corpse was made in Italy and Germany in the 1870s. As far as hygiene was concerned, the reasons for cremation were not to pollute the water-bearing strata and an attempt to streamline the cemetery structure. As in an apparent schizophrenia, scientists of the day worked to both destroy and preserve corpses. There is also the unusual paradox that when the first cremations took place, the corpses were first preserved then to be destroyed later. The catholic world (mainly in Italy) and forensic scientists opposed cremation. It was left to the hygienists to spread the practice of cremation. An analysis of scientific literature shows us that if we leave out the related forensic and ethical problems, recent years have seen attention paid to any harmful emissions from crematoria equipment which have poured into the environment. Another issue is the assessment of inadvertent damage which may be caused by the condition of the corpse. Some topics, however, such as the need for preventive autopsies (first proposed in 1884 in Milan) are still a subject of debate, and seem to pass virtually unchanged from one generation to the next.

Geology, conservation and dissolution of corpses by Paolo Gorini (1813–1881)

“…He could be considered one of the fathers of experimental geology. His research also contributed to the evolution of medicine and hygiene (Porro et al 2012). He supervised and constructed the first crematorium in Woking, in the United Kingdom (Gorini 1879).…”

Lodovico Brunetti, the Unknown Father of Modern Crematorium

“…During the late 19th century, a “Cremation movement” arose in Italy and then spread in the whole Europe, mostly connected to scientific positivism and hygienical purposes (Capone, 2004; Sozzi, 2004), also following the ritual incineration of the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) in 1822 (Capone, 2004; Porro et al, 2012).…”

“…The first “crematorium temple” in Western countries, indeed, opened in Milan in 1876, thanks to the financial efforts of Alberto Keller (1800–1874), industrialist and cremationists, who donated a sum of money to build it, using the type of gas furnace invented by Polli, a rudimentary oven consisting of a simple stone altar with flame spouts powered by illuminating gas (Boi & Celsi, 2015; Capone, 2004; Colombo, 2016; Porro et al, 2012; Sozzi, 2004).…”

“…This motion was enforced the following year with the cremation of the Indiana Raja of Kolhapur, Rajaram II Nagaji Rao (1850-1870, who died in Florence in 1870 and was cremated according to the brahminical funeral tradition (Capone, 2004;Porro et al, 2012). Anyway, open-air pyres were not considered useful or feasible in a civilized society since they were considered a poetic remnant of the past (Mantegazza, 1874).…”

“…Even though Gorini has been generally reported as the inventor of modern crematorium, his experiments and inventions took place after Lodovico Brunetti's work and they were based on the knowledge of the work of Brunetti, who was already officially considered the first to experiment with new cremation methods at the end of the 19th century (Brunetti, 1874;Mantegazza, 1874;Porro et al, 2012). Gorini also praised Brunetti's crematorium both for being quite cheap and for being generally adopted (Carli, 2009).…”