Porro Alessandro, Falconi Bruno, Cristini Carlo, Lorusso Lorenzo, Franchini Antonia F
Dipartimento di Specialità Chirurgiche, Scienze Radiologiche e Medico Forensi, Università di Brescia.
Dipartimento Materno Infantile e Tecnologie Biomediche, Università di Brescia.
J Public Health Res. 2012 Feb 14;1(1):51-8. doi: 10.4081/jphr.2012.e10. eCollection 2012 Feb 17.
Medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century takes on some characteristics of modernity. These characteristics are worthy of our attention because they help us to understand better some of the current problems of hygiene and public health. One of the topics that was most discussed in the scientific-academic milieu of the second half of the nineteenth century was cremation. There was a poetic precedent: the cremation of Percy Bysse Shelley (1792-1822). The earliest apparatus to completely destroy the corpse was made in Italy and Germany in the 1870s. As far as hygiene was concerned, the reasons for cremation were not to pollute the water-bearing strata and an attempt to streamline the cemetery structure. As in an apparent schizophrenia, scientists of the day worked to both destroy and preserve corpses. There is also the unusual paradox that when the first cremations took place, the corpses were first preserved then to be destroyed later. The catholic world (mainly in Italy) and forensic scientists opposed cremation. It was left to the hygienists to spread the practice of cremation. An analysis of scientific literature shows us that if we leave out the related forensic and ethical problems, recent years have seen attention paid to any harmful emissions from crematoria equipment which have poured into the environment. Another issue is the assessment of inadvertent damage which may be caused by the condition of the corpse. Some topics, however, such as the need for preventive autopsies (first proposed in 1884 in Milan) are still a subject of debate, and seem to pass virtually unchanged from one generation to the next.
19世纪下半叶的医学呈现出一些现代性特征。这些特征值得我们关注，因为它们有助于我们更好地理解当前卫生与公共卫生领域的一些问题。19世纪下半叶，科学学术环境中讨论最多的话题之一是火葬。有一个诗意的先例：珀西·比希·雪莱（1792 - 1822）的火葬。最早用于完全销毁尸体的设备是19世纪70年代在意大利和德国制造的。就卫生而言，火葬的原因是不污染含水层以及试图简化墓地结构。就像一种明显的精神分裂症一样，当时的科学家既致力于销毁尸体，也致力于保存尸体。还有一个不同寻常的悖论，即当首次进行火葬时，尸体先是被保存起来，然后才被销毁。天主教世界（主要在意大利）和法医科学家反对火葬。推广火葬做法的任务就落在了卫生学家身上。对科学文献的分析表明，如果我们忽略相关的法医和伦理问题，近年来人们关注的是火葬设备向环境中排放的任何有害气体。另一个问题是对尸体状况可能造成的意外损害的评估。然而，一些话题，比如预防性尸检的必要性（1884年首次在米兰提出），仍然是一个有争议的问题，而且似乎一代又一代几乎没有什么变化。
