I am glad that Malta will finally get a crematorium because the burial system is wasteful of land, especially on islands.

Cremation was widely practised in the ancient world: Etruscans, Greeks and in the Roman Empire among the elite. This reduction of human remains to ash ceased with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

In 1873, at the Great Exhibition in Vienna, Sir Henry Thompson, surgeon to Queen Victoria, saw an experimental “furnace” designed by two Italians (Adolf Hitler must have seen pictures of this furnace). Sir Henry was attracted to the idea of the sanitary disposal of the dead by this Italian model and wrote a book (1874) Cremation: the Treatment of the Body after Death. The first crematorium was established at Woking, Surrey. In 1902, the first Cremation Act was passed and, 50 years later, the second Cremation Act.

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