IN 1839, G. A. WALKER, a London surgeon, published Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly Those in London. Three years later Parliament appointed a House of Commons select committee to investigate “the evils arising from the interment of bodies” in large towns and to consider legislation to resolve the problem.1 Walker’s study opens with a comprehensive history of the modes of interment among all nations, showing the wisdom of ancient practices that removed the dead from the confines of the living. The second portion of the book describes the pathological state of forty-three metropolitan graveyards in an effort to convince the public of the need for legislative interference by the government to prohibit burials in the vicinity of the living.2 Walker’s important work attracted the attention of Parliament and social reformers because of his comprehensive representation of the problem of graveyards, especially among the poor districts of London; his rudimentary statistics that, in effect, isolated them from the rest of the society; and his unbending insistence that national legislators solve the problem. These three impulses influenced the way Edwin Chadwick, secretary to the New Poor Law Commission from 1834 to 1842 and commissioner for the Board of Health from 1848 to 1852, identified and represented the problem of corpses and graveyards in his A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843).