Industrial, furnace cremation was first proposed in Europe in the late nineteenth century. In 1869, a group of medical experts gathered in Florence, Italy, to denounce burial as unhygienic and advocate a switch to cremation. Almost simultaneously, the pro-cremation movement jumped the pond to America, led by reformers such as the absurdly named Reverend Octavius B. Frothingham, who believed it was better for the dead body to transform into “white ashes” than a “mass of corruption.”
