The pro-cremation movement of the nineteenth century battled religious tradition and wasn't considered nearly as often as a viable solution. While cremation is a common form of bodily disposal now, it was taboo in the nineteenth century. Despite cremation's deep precedents in history, Christian leadership in Europe and the United States had long discouraged it, promoting a belief that an intact body was important to a physical resurrection. But recurrent disease epidemics led to overburdened funerary systems and mass graves. This proved pivotal in the reintroduction of cremation to western societies.
The Cremation Society of England, founded in 1874 by Sir Henry Thompson, acknowledged the powerful obstacle of religious tradition. Advocates of cremation countered religious and societal views with cremation's potential health benefits in a time of disease, arguing the choice was more sanitary. Cremation advocates saw mass graves as a public health hazard during epidemics. They promoted the idea that decomposing bodies could pollute the soil with disease. As historian Peter Thorsheim writes, they "believed that it was dangerously naive to assume that the soil would neutralize putrefying corpses, particularly if they belonged to people who had died from communicable diseases."
Advocates also showed that cremation was accepted and practiced around the world. An 1892 issue of Science recalled that during an 1866 cholera outbreak in New York, "an epidemic started almost immediately" near a mass grave. Theye asked: "why then has it [cremation] never been proposed to prevent the propagation of the disease by fire, as other peoples have long been accustomed to do?"
Although germ theory had been present in scientific theory for centuries and was recently bolstered by the medical discoveries of French biologist Louis Pasteur, the decomposing dead were still frequently blamed for epidemics. Some of these theories rested on the now-debunked miasma theory, in which disease is communicated through bad smells. In an 1891 report called "A Discussion on the Disposal of the Dead," The British Medical Journal cited Dr. F. W. Blake, who had witnessed "many examples of revolting instances of polluted churchyards in this country" advising that for "diseases of the human body of a virulent type . . . nothing could be better than cremation."
Currently, 2.5 million people die annually in the US (excluding 2020 where there were more than 500,000 additional deaths due to the pandemic) and the CDC estimates that in the next ten years annual deaths is expected to rise to 3.5 million. The increase is due to the Baby-Boomer generation aging and population growth. As of 2019, 54% of people choose cremation. Within the next ten years that percentage is expected to near 75%.
