Six bundles of what we must guess were once living, breathing, excitable and beloved human beings lie in a neat double row on the floor of a hospital chapel. The seventh we don't have to guess at, and betrays the awful truth of the other wrappings. This was a man. Part of his face is visible at one end, and at the other, his lower legs and feet protrude from beneath a yellow blanket. This photograph of corpses lying on an unrefrigerated floor in Bedford Hospital, which appeared in newspapers yesterday, has caused horror and dismay. It has provoked a new outcry over the state of the National Health Service, in which one hospital had nowhere to store the dead. The hospital mortuary was full and a temporary one was out of action because of problems with the doors.
Yet it could be argued that there is no more respectful place to store bodies in a crisis than in the hospital chapel. Public hygiene would not have allowed them to stay there for long. And in an age when we are used to hearing about patients waiting in corridors on trolleys, why are we so shocked by the idea of corpses lying for a time on the floor? Could the truth be that the horror the picture instils in us has less to do with our worries over NHS resources than some deeply held feelings about what is due to the dead, and some even deeper anxieties about facing the only thing inevitable for all of us?
Jenny Hockey, a senior lecturer in social policy at Hull University, and one of the authors of Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity, thinks our usual contact with death, in an age where 70% die in hospital, is limited and cosmeticised. If you go to the funeral director's viewing parlour, you see something that resembles the person you loved - dressed in their clothes, perhaps made up. "But what that looks like," she says of the picture at Bedford, "is a heap of rubbish. Our bodies are us. Perhaps increasingly we use our bodies to make statements about who we are, what with the emphasis on dress and fashion and cosmetic surgery and breast implants. But at the end of the day we are just an object, and something to be disposed of."
The bundled bodies were once seven individuals who probably never met in life. They haven't the option to avoid each other in death. "They are jumbled together. It gives you images of the pauper's grave - holocaust imagery and all the mass graves."
Individual achievement in life has long given us the right to individuality when it ends, with a grave bearing our name. Only paupers did not use to get one. The Anatomy Act of the 1830s made it legal for their bodies to be used for dissection. "To have your body given into the hands of people who didn't know you was the final insult," says Hockey.
Somehow, the exposed feet, which have flopped apart lifelessly, are the most shocking part of the Bedford photograph. Having your toes turned up is a metaphor for death, Hockey points out. Dead bodies have been pictured with a luggage label tied to the big toe. It is a powerful image. Hands and feet - once so strong and active - are stilled.
Of course, the fact that the bodies were in a hospital makes it worse. "This is an institution which we hope we can trust, but have lots of worries about. This is like confronting our worst fears. You put yourself in their hands and this is how you end up," says Hockey. A growing trend towards woodland burials, secularised ceremonies in which friends and family celebrate the passing, and young victims of Aids planning their own last rites, assert the importance of individuality to the end and beyond. But bundled bodies on a floor is "like being stripped of who we are by an institution".
Social anthropologist Leonie Kellaher, from the University of North London, thinks the picture is disturbing because of a strange mixture of associations. "It is the kind of scene we associate with famine. They are bound up like something from Ethiopia. It is not a mortuary scene with which people will be familiar, and yet it is in a hospital." In this country, burials take place in coffins, except in the Muslim community where bodies can be wrapped and faces exposed.
She and co-author Doris Francis are working on a book, provisionally entitled The Secret Cemetery. Much of what happens to dead bodies is still secret, Kellaher says, even if they are no longer rifled for their pituitary glands and spare parts as they once were. Processes like the laying out are a mystery to most of us. It wasn't always like that. In the East End in the 1930s, people died at home and a local woman, whose job it was, would prepare the body for viewing in the front room. "She would do it at home because people couldn't afford the funeral expenses. Children would visit dead babies."
Most of us now die a medicalised death. Families are unsure whether they can cope with a death at home. So we have no control over the body of our parent when he or she dies. We expect the hospital to behave in as reverent a fashion as we would. But it doesn't always happen that way.
Malcolm Johnson, chair of the National Funeral College, says that the moral panic over the bodies in the chapel is maybe "an example of being shocked by what we don't know . . . How many people have been to a mortuary? People have no sense of what is custom and practice. There are a lot of things hospitals do at the end of life that are reprehensible."
As soon as a patient dies, he says, "they whisk the body off at great speed. Very often they lie about on trolleys here and there just covered up - sometimes in corridors or waiting outside the mortuary," says Johnson. Their personal effects are put in a black bin-liner to be handed to the relative.
But in an increasingly secular society, where vast numbers of people would say, if asked, that a human being is nothing more than some recyclable material after death, what is this worry about the treatment of our mortal remains? According to Tony Walters, director of the MA course in death and society at Reading University, it has existed in human culture for a very long time, and it runs very deep.
"We are reasonably comfortable with skeletons because they are in their final state, but something in between that and the live body moving around is a very problematic object, especially a freshly dead corpse which somehow looks alive and yet isn't.
"It is why human societies deal with their recently dead in a highly ritualised fashion. All societies create quite well understood ritual rules about how the dead but not buried should be handled. Even a reasonably free society like ours, not governed much by etiquette, has rules. When they are broken, we feel disgust, which is what has happened with these pictures."
It is quite difficult for hospitals to get it right, he says. They are bureaucratic, pragmatic, technology-oriented places. A dead body is a collection of non-functioning human tissue, due for disposal. The mysteries of rite and ritual, which mean so much to friends and family, may go by the board. "People working within the bureaucratic medical framework can quite easily forget what is ritually required," says Walters.
It doesn't mean that they can cope any better with the newly dead. Morticians and others who handle bodies as a routine have their own shield, which is often black humour. We all need a filter.
"Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily," said the 17th-century writer la Rochefoucauld. Archaeologists have revealed the death rituals and rites of civilisations through past ages, to the Pyramids and beyond. The deepest act of degradation to someone who has died is to treat their remains without respect. It happened to the Jews in the last war. It happened in past centuries to traitors in England who were hanged, drawn and then quartered.
Death is shocking because we do not understand it, and cannot control it. Religion helps us to cope, as do secular rituals and social rules. When the rules are flouted, and bodies are not tended and cared for in the way we expect, whether in a war like Kosovo or on a hospital floor, we all feel the offence - because it brings home the grim nakedness of death.
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