Twice in Hades, Bloom thinks of the gases produced by
putrefaction. He ponders them at length in the mortuary chapel
while watching the bloated Father Coffey perform the service:
"What swells him up that way? Molly gets swelled after
cabbage. Air of the place maybe. Looks full up of bad gas.
Must be an infernal lot of bad gas round the place." In the
crypts under St. Werburgh's church, he recalls, "they have to
bore a hole in the coffins sometimes to let out the bad gas
and burn it. Out it rushes: blue. One whiff of that and you're
a goner." Bloom is right that holes were sometimes bored in
coffins to let out methane and other gases. He is wrong about
mere whiffs of the stuff being deadly, but that had been a
commonly held opinion for many decades, even among physicians.
As European cities got older and bigger, cemeteries became
grotesquely crowded places, with disinterred bones scattered
about, bodies stacked on top of others from twenty feet down
to inches below the surface, and coffins or human remains
popping out of the ground with distressing frequency. The
solution devised in some cities in the 19th century was to
establish spacious parklike cemeteries in the suburbs, where
open land was more abundant, ventilation better, and the soil
more suited to managing decomposition and drainage. Both Prospect Cemetery (which
opened its gates in 1832) and Mount
Jerome Cemetery (1836) exemplify this new trend. Bloom
thinks that the superintendent of the latter calls it "His
garden," and he imagines corpses creating rich compost for
plants—an almost wholesome thought.
But in more crowded graveyards, and in churches where bodies
were stowed in stone vaults, the gases produced by
decomposition were seen as a threat to public health. A
well-researched and vividly written book by Lee Jackson, Dirty
Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth (2014),
looks at how reformers in the 1830s and 40s, particularly the
surgeon George Alfred ("Graveyard") Walker, mistakenly argued
that the "miasma" from poorly interred corpses was poisoning
London. "The existence of such gases," Jackson observes, "was
undisputed—sextons and undertakers were often called up to
'tap' coffins in church vaults, drilling a hole to prevent
them breaking open with explosive force. Walker dutifully
recorded the effects of leaking miasma on the constitution
of gravediggers, ranging from general ill health ('pain in
the head, heaviness, extreme debility, lachrymation, violent
palpitation of the heart, universal trembling, with
vomiting') to sudden death. Gas could, indeed, prove
fatal: graveyard workers who broke into bloated coffins were
occasionally suffocated by the release of 'cadaverous
vapours'" (116). But there is no evidence that diluted
exposure caused illness.
In his book At Home (2010), Bill Bryson too discusses
the fear of "bad gas" in relation to London's hideously
overcrowded cemeteries: "Mourners in cities almost never
attended at graveside to witness a burial itself. The
experience was simply too upsetting, and widely held to be
dangerous in addition. Anecdotal reports abounded of graveyard
visitors struck down by putrid emanations. A Dr. Walker
testified to a parliamentary inquiry that graveyard
workers, before disturbing a coffin, would drill a hole in
the side, insert a tube, and burn off the escaping gases—a
process that could take twenty minutes, he reported. He knew
of one man who failed to observe the usual precautions and
was felled instantly—'as if struck with a cannon-ball'—by
the gases from a fresh grave. 'To inhale this gas, undiluted
with atmospheric air, is instant death,' confirmed the
committee in its written report, 'and even when much diluted
it is productive of disease which commonly ends in death.'
Till late in the century, the medical journal The Lancet
ran occasional reports of people overcome by bad air while
visiting graveyards" (320-21).
Dr. Walker's efforts to save Londoners from miasma at first
encountered indifference from government authorities and
strong opposition from the property owners and churchmen who
collected a fee for every person planted in their yards. But
he persisted, and the 1842 parliamentary inquiry to which
Bryson refers, followed by growing public clamor and an
outbreak of cholera in 1848, led to laws being passed in 1850
and 1852 which closed down most urban graveyards and church
vaults and moved burials to parklike suburban settings. Bloom
is visiting one of those more hygienic sites and does not
appear to worry about his own safety, but the sight of the
priest employed in the mortuary chapel makes him wonder about
the effects of long-term exposure. Later in the chapter, he
has similar thoughts about the cemetery's caretaker, John
O'Connell: "Fancy being his wife. Wonder how he had the
gumption to propose to any girl. Come out and live in the
graveyard. Dangle that before her....Gas of graves.
Want to keep her mind off it to conceive at all."
