In 1839 he began a long campaign to end "intramural interment", commencing with a pamphlet entitled Gatherings from Graveyards.
By the late 1840s, it was generally accepted that urban graveyards were a danger to human health.
He petitioned the home secretary, denouncing graveyards as "laboratories of malaria … so many centres of infection, constantly giving off noxious effluvia".
"You don't see many graveyards in megachurches," say the sceptics.
These martyrs are buried in enormous mass graveyards and are often commemorated in road names.A quick note here on the use of the word "martyr".
Graveyards are expanding in all directions, and tombs are overrun with weeds because the living are too weak to tend them.
Yossi Sarid, leader of the opposition Meretz Party, says complete quiet is attainable "only in graveyards, and we've got too many of those".
Graveyards and memorial pages in newspapers make it plain that young people, especially women, are dying in droves.
The biggest French graveyards are those of the soldiers who died in the first world war.
But farming cannot support two families, so the younger man has taken a job tending graveyards instead.
Linked to al-Qaeda, it has vowed to "strike Kenyans where it hurts the most, turn their cities into graveyards".Mr Kenyatta's policy will be complicated by his own impending trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he has been charged with masterminding violence in 2007-08 after a disputed election that left 1,300-odd 1,300-oddad.
