BOOK REVIEW
Has our sanitised approach to death made us less accepting of its inevitability?
In Edinburgh, a hospital-bound cholera van was attacked by a crowd convinced its human cargo was destined to become surgical fodder. Meanwhile, when a new, unconsecrated paupers’ cemetery was created on Paisley’s outskirts, terrified locals dug up graves only to find them devoid of bodies. “The obvious next step,” writes Flanders, “was to attack the cholera hospital itself, where they believed the exhumed dead had been taken for anatomisation.”