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(7.) That it should be made an offence to retain a
dead body unburied or otherwise legally disposed of
beyond a period not exceeding eight days, except by
permission of a Magistrate.
(8.) That the practice of burial in pits or common
graves should be discontinued.
(9.) That still-births which have reached the stage of
development of seven months should be registered upon
the certificate of a registered medical practitioner, and
that it should not be permitted to bury or otherwise
dispose of the still-birth until an order for burial has
been issued by the Registrar.
(10.) That, subject always to the discretion of the
Crown Office, the result of precognitions taken by the
Procurators Fiscal in Scotland, or the precognitions themselves,
should be communicated to the representatives of
deceased, when application is made for the same.
The system of death certification is primarily a
legal procedure devised to secure satisfactory proof
that every death is due to what may be called
natural causes with the secondary intention of
checking and preventing crime. With the growth
of sanitation and the introduction of vital statistics,
which form so important a branch of the subject,
the certificates have acquired great value as the
units on which the most important statistics are
based.
The Select Committee was appointed “to inquire
into the sufficiency of the existing Law as to the
Disposal of the Dead, for securing an accurate
Record of the Cause of Death in all cases, and especially
for detecting them where death may have been