Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (77 page)

It was no coincidence that the earliest proponents for cremation were physicians like Henry Thompson who claimed that cremation was “a necessary sanitary precaution against the propagation of disease among a population daily growing larger in relation to the area it occupied.”

The Catholic Church banned cremation until 1963.

OLD FLAMES

But was cremation even legal in Britain? Nobody knew for sure. There weren’t any laws on the books that forbade it, but there weren’t any that allowed it, either. With the exception of epidemics and other emergencies when burial was not possible, cremation had fallen out of practice for more than 1,000 years.

The ancient Greeks had practiced cremation as a battlefield necessity—the only way that the bodies of heroes killed in faraway lands could be returned home was by reducing them to ashes. Over time, as cremating bodies on top of giant funeral pyres became increasingly associated with heroism, it became the customary way of disposing of the dead. The Romans adopted the practice from the Greeks, but when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, cremation was abandoned in favor of burial. (Another practical reason: erecting enormous funeral pyres had gotten so out of hand that supplies of wood were beginning to run short.)

LEGAL QUESTIONS

As a pillar of the British medical establishment, Thompson had access to some of the best legal minds in the country. When they concluded that there was nothing in the law that forbade cremation, the society started raising money to purchase a suitable site on which to build a crematorium. The bishop of Rochester blocked the society’s attempt to build one on donated land inside a Church of England cemetery in London, so they bought land next to a cemetery in Woking, southwest of London, and built it there. Woking was connected to London by train, which would make transportation of remains for cremation fairly easy.

By early 1879, the crematorium was ready for testing, and on March 17 England’s first modern cremation took place when a dead horse was put to the flames. It went off without a hitch—the horse was totally consumed, save for a couple of pounds worth of bone fragments, in a little over two hours. The combustion was so complete that almost no smoke or odor escaped up the chimney.

The Cremation Society was ready to repeat the experiment with a human body, but the horrified citizens of Woking, led by a local vicar, fought to have the crematorium shut down. They appealed to the British government, which had its own concerns that cremation might be used by murderers to destroy evidence of their crimes. After considering the issue, the government decided to ban cremation unless and until the British Parliament expressly permitted the practice. The Cremation Society resigned itself to the decision but began lobbying for a change.

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FIRE FIGHT

Then in 1882, a man named Captain Hanham asked the society to cremate both his wife and his mother, as they had requested in their wills. The society forwarded Hanham’s request to the government, which refused to allow it. Infuriated, Captain Hanham built a crematorium on his own estate and did the job himself. The Hanham cremations received a lot of press attention, but the British government declined to prosecute Captain Hanham. (When he died a year later, he was cremated there, too.)

The next step toward legalization came in 1884, after an eccentric 84-year-old Welsh physician named Dr. William Price tried to cremate the body of his five-month-old son. An outspoken proponent of cremation, Dr. Price decided to dispose of his son’s remains in as public a fashion as possible, cremating the linen-wrapped body in an open fire in plain view of a church just as the congregation was leaving Sunday-evening church services. The horrified crowd pulled the body from the flames before it was consumed, and then chased Dr. Price back to his house and tried to kill him. His mistress held them off with a shotgun until the police came and hauled him off to jail.

Price went on trial in Cardiff, Wales, and in February 1884 the court found him not guilty, ruling that cremation is legal “provided no nuisance is caused in the process to others.” Dr. Price was released from jail, but another eight weeks passed before he was allowed to finish cremating his son’s remains. (In the meantime he kept them under his bed.)

BURNING OPPORTUNITY

Now that a court had ruled in favor of cremation, the Cremation Society declared that it was willing to cremate anyone who made such a request in their will. And on March 26, 1885, a “well-known figure in literary and scientific circles” named Mrs. Pickersgill became the first non-horse to receive a modern cremation in England.

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Cremation may have been legal, but it still took a long time for the practice to be accepted. Only three people were cremated in all of England in 1885, and it wasn’t until 1902 that Parliament passed a law explicitly allowing it. Today, however, more than 60 percent of English people are cremated when they die.

The first American crematorium opened in Washington, Pennsylvania, in 1876, but cremation has taken much longer to catch on in the United States than it did in England. Today only about 20 percent of Americans are cremated, compared to more than half in Germany, Denmark, and other European countries. Japan beats them all—in a land where cemetery space is very scarce, more than 96 percent of people are cremated.

OTHER WAYS TO GO

Still not convinced that cremation is right for you? Here are some other ways of disposing of your remains:

•
Platforms
. The Sioux Indians placed their dead on high platforms that protected them from animals on the ground but allowed carrion-eating birds to feed on the remains. Some Aboriginal tribes in Australia left their dead in trees.

•
Freeze-Drying
. A newer method is immersing a body in liquid nitrogen until it is frozen solid, then smashing it into tiny pieces and freeze-drying them. (It hasn’t caught on yet.)

•
Electroplating
. In 1891 Dr. Varlot of France developed a method by which a corpse could be dipped in silver nitrate, then exposed to phosphorus and finally a copper sulphate solution, resulting in a body electroplated with copper. Varlot hoped to use the method to preserve dead bodies until science progressed to the point that they could be resuscitated. (It hasn’t caught on, either.)

•
Dead-Acid Batteries
. An atheist named Jimmy Loizeau has proposed using the stomach acid from a deceased person to create a battery, which could then be used to power a flashlight. “Even if the flashlight is off, the bereaved may be comforted in the fact their loved one’s electrical potential can be summoned at the flick of a switch,” Loizeau writes. Loizeau also proposes adjusting the menus of “last suppers” to include foods likely to “promote acid production” so that the batteries will last longer.

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SAVANT SYNDROME

In the 1988 movie
Rain Man,
Dustin Hoffman played an autistic man with amazing abilities. His performance won an Oscar and introduced millions of people to one of the most mysterious conditions known to medicine
.

I
SLANDS OF BRILLIANCE
• Ellen Boudreaux is blind and has never seen a clock. Yet this California resident always knows exactly what time it is, down to the precise second her favorite TV show begins. It’s almost as if she has a digital clock in her brain.

• Leslie Lemke, of Arpin, Wisconsin, was born blind with severe mental disabilities, but can play any piece of music on the piano after hearing it just once.

• Alonzo Clemens, of Boulder, Colorado, struggles to express himself with a vocabulary of barely 100 words, yet he can sculpt a perfect clay likeness of a horse in less than an hour. His work is sold in art galleries worldwide.

These people are living examples of a condition known as
savant syndrome
. As defined by Dr. Darold A. Treffert, the world’s leading expert on the subject, savant syndrome is “a rare but spectacular condition” in which people with developmental disorders have “astonishing islands of ability, brilliance, or talent” that make them stand out from the crowd.

Savants possess remarkable skills in number and calendar calculation, art and music, mechanical aptitude, and feats of memory. They’re called
splinter skills
, because they exist in such dramatic contrast to their owner’s physical and mental disabilities. Savants are often obsessed with memorizing facts such as sports and music trivia, map details, or history; counting things such as license plate numbers; or have quirkier habits, such as cataloging vacuum cleaner sounds. The most frequent expression of savant ability is in music, often found combined with blindness and perfect pitch.

THEY’RE NO IDIOTS

Until recently, people with this condition were known as “idiot savants,” a term coined in 1887 by Dr. J. Langdon Down (also known for identifying Down syndrome). Down combined the then-accepted medical term for low IQ with the French word
savant
, which means “knowledgeable one.” The phrase has fallen into disuse, partly because of the pejorative nature of the word “idiot”—but mostly because it doesn’t really describe most people with this condition. Although roughly half of the world’s savants suffer from some degree of mental disability, few are clinically “idiots” (IQ below 25). There is also a significant relationship between savant syndrome and autism—1 of 10 persons with autism has savant skills, a phenomenally high proportion—and many autistic savants have higher than average, or even genius-level, IQs.

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PASSING THE TEST-OSTERONE

One particular statistic about savant syndrome—that it’s six times more common in males than females—has led to a provocative theory about its cause. Many experts believe the syndrome stems from damage to the left half of the brain, due to a congenital defect or physical injury, resulting in an overcompensation by the right half of the brain.

In the 1980s, neurologists Norman Geschwind and Albert Galaburda proposed a theory suggesting that the culprit causing this disorder is testosterone. The left half of the brain develops later than the right, which exposes it to possible fetal injury for a longer time. The male fetus starts producing the male sex hormone testosterone at eight weeks. But the hormone is also neurotoxic, which means it’s poisonous to nerve cells. Geschwind and Galaburda have suggested that this hormonal flooding of the underdeveloped left hemisphere could be responsible for the brain damage that leads to savant syndrome.

FAMOUS SAVANTS

•
Thomas Fuller (1710–1790)
. An 18th-century black slave from Alexandria, Virginia, who could, according to the doctor who studied him, “comprehend scarcely anything more complex than counting.” But when the doctor asked him how many seconds were lived by a man who died at the age of 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours old, Fuller took only 90 seconds to come up with his answer: 2,210,500,800. When told he was wrong, Fuller pointed out that the doctor had forgotten to include the 17 leap years that would have occurred in 70 years.

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•
“Blind Tom” Bethune (1849–1908)
. He was so mentally disabled that he could barely put together a coherent sentence, yet he could play more than 5,000 pieces on the piano. Born a slave on a Georgia plantation, Tom was considered too simpleminded to do any work. Although he had never touched a piano before, at four years old he startled his master when he sat down and suddenly started playing. He became a concert pianist, learning his classical repertoire after hearing each piece only once. At a concert early in his career, he was challenged by local musicians to prove his uncanny ability to play by ear. They played two brand-new compositions, which he repeated flawlessly. From then on the “challenge” became a regular part of his performances.

•
James Henry Pullen (1835–1916)
. A deaf mute from London, at the age of seven he could only speak one word, but he could carve model boats out of wood. Pullen spent most of his life in asylums, particularly one called Earlswood, where he was encouraged to develop his woodworking skills. Pullen was moody and prone to fits of anger, but he was a gifted carpenter, crafting beautiful furniture and marvelous carved boats of his own imagining. His masterpiece: a model of the sailing ship
Great Eastern
. It took seven years to carve and was accurate down to the rivets. Pullen became known as the “Genius of Earlswood,” his work attracting the attention of England’s rich and famous, including the future king Edward VII.

•
Kim Peek
. Born in 1951 with an enlarged head and without a
corpus callosum
, the tissue that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. At 16 months, Kim could memorize any book that was read to him. By the time he was three, he was looking up words in the dictionary (he didn’t learn to walk until he was four). Obsessed with numbers, he would read telephone directories, then add the columns of telephone numbers. When riding in a car he’d total the license plate numbers of passing cars.

Known as “Kimputer” to friends and family, Kim is a walking databank, rattling off facts about British monarchs, horse racing, the Bible, baseball, composers, movies, the space program, authors, geography, and literature. He can recall, word for word, every book he’s ever read—all 9,600 of them. Dustin Hoffman met Kim while doing research for
Rain Man
, and was so impressed by Kim’s abilities that he told him, “I may be a star but you are the heavens.”