NECROPHILISM, an unnatural and revolting love or appetite for the dead which has manifested itself in various ways. Consorting or living with the dead has been observed as a characteristic of melancholia. Individuals have inhabited grave-yards preferring the proximity and association of corpses with which they had no tie, to the cheerfulness and comforts of home; and there is recorded one notorious case in which a gentleman, although on bad terms with his wife while alive, carried her body with him through India, scandalizing the natives and outraging the feelings of all by placing the coffin under his bed. This hideous tendency may enter into certain developments of cannibal ism where the feast is celebrated in memory of a departed friend, rather than in triumph over a slain foe. It is affirmed that there were tmthropophagous epidemics in 1436 and 1500; and the history of vampirism connects that delusion with the moral perversion now described. Patients in asylums, especially in continental asylums, are still often
encountered who bemoan the crime of having devoured the dead and violated charnel houses. The most extraordinary exhibition of necrophilism is where individuals, not in fancy but in reality, have exhumed corpses to see them, to kiss them, to carry them away to their own homes, or to mutilate and tear them to pieces. It is worthy of notice that, so far as such cases have been observed in this country, they have been confined to communities living in remote places, of rude and unenlightened character, and cher ishing the superstitions of ages and states of society with which they have no other connection, and of which they have almost lost the recollection.—Annales, Medico rsycleologiques, t. viii. p. 472.