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7
A case of the prolonged retention of a dead body occurred in a room
of one of the houses in Inkhorn Court. The room was occupied by a
family of 7 persons as a living and sleeping apartment, and had a cubic
space of only 1536 feet, affording an average space to each person of 219
cubic feet. The court is very narrow, and has houses on each side, which
are inhabited by 118 persons. The Inspector, on visiting this case,
strongly urged upon the friends of the deceased to get the body removed
immediately; but as an inquest was to be held, they said that they could
not do so, and the result was that the burial did not take place for two
days after, when the body became a disgusting nuisance. This room was
ordered by the Inspector to be purified, which order the landlord obeyed
by limewhiting the entire house, and he gave immediate notice to the
tenants to quit the premises.
On bringing this case under the notice of the Board, and pointing out
to them that, as the 27th section of the Sanitary Act of 1866 had not been
carried out, the officers had no power to compel the removal of a dead
body, the Board unanimously passed a resolution to the effect, that it was
expedient to have a Mortuary House erected in the district, and that the
• Medical Officer and Surveyor be instructed to look out for a proper site
whereon to erect a suitable building for that purpose. As the prejudices
of the people must be considered in inducing them to conform to the necessity
of having their dead removed to a mortuary house, care must be taken
not to erect a building of such a repulsive character as will deter them
from making use of it, although the building need not be of such an
ornamental and expensive nature as will too deeply trench upon the rates
of the district. The few existing dead houses in the district are all too
small for the purposes intended by the Act, and are so inconveniently
situated, that not one of them can be made available for the purposes of a
Mortuary House. The evils arising from a long retention of a dead body
in the living and sleeping room of a family have been so repeatedly pointed
out, that I need not here recapitulate them, but many of them might be
considerably mitigated if a similar custom prevailed in the large towns in
England, as regards the period of retaining the dead among the living, as
is found to prevail in some parts of the United Kingdom, viz.: a period
varying from two to three days. Here, unfortunately, the custom is to
retain a corpse for a period of seven or eight days. Owing to the facilities
now afforded by railways of gathering together the friends of the deceased
to attend the funeral, it is no longer necessary among the wealthy classes
of society to retain a corpse, so long as might have been necessary before
the invention of those rapid modes of conveyance. If therefore, the
upper classes, seeing that there is now no necessity for delaying interment
beyond two or three days, would set the example of early burial, their