Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 August 1883 — Necessity of Cremating Yellow Fever Corpses. [ARTICLE]

Necessity of Cremating Yellow Fever Corpses.

One of the most horrible discoveries of modern science is surely that of Dr. Domingo Freire, of Bio de, Janeiro. That city had been seriously afflicted with yellow fever, and Dr. Freire, in his inquiries into the causes of the epidemic, came upon the dreadful fact that the soil of the cemeteries in which the victims of the outbreak were buried was positively alive with microbian organisms exactly identical with those found in the vomitings, blood, etc., of those who had died in the hospitals of yellow fever. From a foot under ground he gathered a sample of the earth overlying the remains of a person tvho had been buried about a year before; and though it showed nothing remarkable in appearance or smell, it was found under the microscope to be thickly charged with these abominable disease germs. Many of the organisms were making spontaneous movements. In fact, therefore, the cemeteries are so many nurseries of yellow fever; for every year the rain washes the soil and the fever seed with which it is so closely sown into the water courses, and distributes them over the town and neighborhood. Says the doctor, “If each course is the bearer of millions of millions of organisms that are specifics of ill, imagine what a cemetery must be in which new foci are forming around each body. In the silence of death these worlds of organisms, invisible to the unassisted eye,’ are laboring incessantly and unperceived to fill more graves with more bodies destined for their food and for the fatal perpetuation of their species. ” How terribly fatal these organisms are, indeed, may be understood from the fact that the blood of a yellow fever patient injected into a rabbit killed the animal in an hour, that the rabbit’s blood injected into a guinea pig killed it, and that the guinea pig’s blood injected into another rabbit killed it also, so that the chain of destruction may apparently be endless, for each victim on post-mortem examination was found to have all its blood swarming with malignant germs. Surely the cremation of all -yellow fever corpses becomes, in the light of Dr. Freire’s discovery, a public necessity.— St. James Gazette.'