Page 3 - cemetery_tour_curriculum guide

that the Saxons used their burrowing skills to signify prestige. Dead men of great
reputation were covered with more dirt than their lesser. This covering over the dead
was called a barrow. The mythic significance of these structures and their relationship
to other aspects of community life may have been an afterthought. Whether theologies
of death were a motive or a rationale, both rituals and monuments for the dead played
an important part in the development of our early imaginations.

Early Christians, who had grown used to spending their religious lives hiding among the
dead in the catacombs, forgot the importance of hygienic measures around a dead
body. The dead were often stacked high in churches. Church burial yards were often
covered over several times to make room for successive layers of corpses. Conflicts
between Church and State existed then as they do now, with civil servants laboring
without much success to move the place of burial beyond the city walls. Worshippers
often got a fast ticket to the afterlife simply by hearing Mass amid the victims of recent
epidemics.

Doctors occasionally made mistakes. Even in modern times, living people have been
sent to the morgue. Bodies that were determined to be brain dead have later revived.
Vital signs that disappeared even after long attempts to resuscitation have returned.
Pathologists have begun autopsies only to discover a still beating heart in the chest
cavity. The one certain sign that a person is dead is the onset of putrefaction. The
stories of Edgar Allen Poe and real life accounts of premature burials so frightened
people that elaborate devices were patented to allow the deceased to communicate
with the outside world in the event of a mistake. Some people asked their doctors to
insert needles in their heart. Embalmers have grimly notes that once a body is
embalmed or cremated, it is most certainly dead.

Before embalming and other sanitary measures, graveyards were often littered with
bones and bits of fleshy material. Shallow graves allowed maggots and scavengers to
dig up and scatter the remains along with any contagion they might also carry. Despite
the unhealthiness, the living used churchyards as social centers where they conducted
markets, played games, and, in Scotland, prepared for that massive corpse-producing
activity known as war by practicing archery or other weapons drills. The English
Parliament suspected that funeral and burial customs played a role in spreading the
Black Death. In 1665, it legislated against unnecessary visits by friends and children,
large funeral, and, most importantly, graves less than six feet deep.

A later threat to eternal rest was resurrectionists or body snatchers. These gentlemen
supplied the medical profession with the materials by which they could better
understand the mechanics of the living body. Many attempts were made to foil the
designs of these entrepreneurs who worked in teams and could life a body from its
coffin by merely exposing the top half. Loopholes in the law allowed this practice to
continue without prosecution for many years: the body snatchers simply did not steal
any of the corpse’s possessions or clothes. Measures to protect the corpse were
thwarted by the grave robber’s ingenuity: one patented, hinge less wrought-iron coffin
proved quite susceptible to sledgehammers. Some turned to procuring fresher material