From Victorian times through the industrial age pestilence and disease were common in the crowded wards of State institutions for the indigent, insane and disabled. But the limits of medical science and inadequate support for these asylums in those dark days were especially detrimental to the institutionalized poor who, even in death, could not be cared for.
Oftentimes their remains were unclaimed by friends or relatives, unable to have supported their loved ones in life and too sick or indigent themselves to bury them in death; and so they were buried by the State instead, in pauper's cemeteries located on or near the grounds of those asylums in which the deceased lived their final days.
