Science: Heart Burial

From England, where antiquarians ponder over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, Heart Burial* a new tome, reached the U. S. last week. The author, Charles Angell Bradford, concerns himself primarily with hearts given special burial in the London district. Besides that, he tries anthropologically to link the faded fad with the canopic burials of viscera in ancient Egypt.

The customs had different logics. Egyptians believed that the preservation of a man’s identity required the preservation of the entire body. Because the viscera were difficult to preserve in situ the Egyptians lifted them out, put the heart and lungs in one jar.† the liver and bladder in another, the stomach and large intestine in a third, the small intestines in a fourth jar, all of which rested in the tomb with the embalmed body.

Until at least 1926 the ruling house of Saxony followed something of the same procedure. As soon as death was certain, the heart and entrails were removed. The heart, in a casket, was placed on a white satin pillow at one side of the coffin; the entrails in a white satin-covered jar, at the other side. When the coffin went to its vault the heart-casket and entrails-jar went onto a bracket alongside.

The Saxon princelings followed not religion like the Egyptians, but sanitation and sentiment, which Christianity was obliged to salute as soon as the sensibilities of churchgoers objected to the smell of corporeal corruption within churches. The hearts of the Popes from Sixtus V (1590) to Benedict XV (1922) are in the church of Sts. Vincent & Anastasius in Rome.

Writer Thomas Hardy was the last famed Englishman to have his bodythus separated. The body lies in Westminster Abbey, the heart in Dorset, beside his first wife. Since Hardy, reports Author Bradford, the practice of burying the heart separately from the body has not recurred in Christendom.

Romantic to the end was the heart of Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822. Italian sanitary laws then required the immediate cremation of a drowned corpse. Those who disposed of Shelley’s corpse were Poet Leigh Hunt (who wrote a nerve-wracking description of the event), Poet George Gordon Lord Byron, and Adventurer Edward John Trelawny. As Shelley’s incinerating ribs fell apart on their pyre of driftwood, adventurous Trelawny, a lion of a man, thrust in his brawny arm, snatched out the simmering heart. Cried Lord Byron: ”Don’t repeat this with me. Let my carcass rot where it falls!”†

* Publisher: Allen & Unwin (8 s. 6 d..).

† Sometimes the heart was left in the cadaver.But Byron’s heart is at Missolonghi, Greece, where he died, his body atHucknall-Torkard, England.