In the 1850s, the British government began closing urban churchyards on the premise that rotting bodies were dangerous to the public health. It did so mainly on the advice of a small but influential group of sanitary reformers, who considered miasma from overcrowded burial spaces to be a primary cause of contemporary epidemics. Their ‘burial reform’ legislation prescribed the permanent closure of large numbers of historic British churchyards, and burials were moved instead to purpose-built, closely-regulated cemeteries outside inhabited areas. The end result, according to historians, was that the British public were awakened to the health threat posed by the dead, and medical experts were, for the first time, invited to the fore of discussions about how death and burial should be managed in a modern society.

This talk explores burial sanitation in Britain over the century preceding ‘burial reform’. It demonstrates that disease concerns had long been fundamental to corpse disposal practice, and explores how the dead were managed by urban localities as a population health problem. Overall, the talk reassesses the history of ‘burial reform’ and, with it, conventional accounts of ‘medicalisation’ in British death practice.

Eleanor Kerfoot is a historian of death and medicine with a particular focus on early modern Britain. Her current research project focuses on medical understandings of post-mortem change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.