Burials

Abstract

Burial is always a problem in a tropical climate. Deterioration is rapid and the risk of infection is high. Any visitor to modern Bahia who has seen the bizarre spectacle of a cortège trotting through the streets, in the late afternoon, coffin bouncing on the carriers’ shoulders, is aware of this problem. Nowadays a law decrees that burial must take place on the same day as death, before the cemetery closes at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. In colonial Brazil there were no such laws. Burials were unhygienic and superficial. In 1832 a commission on public health in Rio reported that on premature exhumation ‘the bones would come out with the ligaments and membranes still clinging to them, and the soft and rotting tissues would adhere like mire to the mattocks’.¹