Green space and public health in nineteenth-century London. Burial and cremation in the late nineteenth century.

'Burial, Cremation, and the Environment in Nineteenth Century London Drawing on scholarship by Christopher Hamiln, Bill Luckin, and Christopher Otter, this project examines debates about burial and cremation in nineteenth century London to illumine changing ideas about the body, the environment, and the city. Writing in the 1830s, the surgeon George Alfred Walker asserted that the greatest threat to the health of the living came from those who had already died. The burial grounds of London, he warned, were 'literally saturated with the dead'. When cholera struck London in 1849, health experts traced the epidemic to air contaminated by the thousands of decomposing corpses in their midst. In the decade that followed many urban cemeteries were forced to close, and new cemeteries were established outside of London. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, two disparate groups attacked prevailing burial practice. The first group, led by the eminent physician Sir Henry Thompson, advocated cremation. The second, led by the artist Sir Francis Seymour Haden, rejected both traditional interment and cremation and called for 'earth-to-earth' burial, a method intended to return the body's elements to the environment quickly and completely. I wish to travel from my home institution in the US to London in March 2007 to conduct approximately three weeks of research for this project. While there, I plan to consult rare published and unpublished documents held in the Wellcome Library by Walker, Thompson, Haden, and other medical writers and organisations. I plan to disseminate my findings through a peer-reviewed article in an academic historical journal.