Death

Volume VI, Number 4 | fall 2013

Purchase

"The Antiquary's Last Will and Testament" from The English Dance of Death, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1814.

Preamble

Memento Mori

By Lewis H. Lapham

Learning how to die, as Michel de Montaigne once rightly said, is the unlearning of how to be a slave.

Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare, by Gustave Courbet. 1857.

Essay

Mournful Creatures

By Virginia Morell

Humans may be the only animals who understand our mortality, but when it comes to grieving, we are not so unique.

Map

Departures

A million ways to die.

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Miscellany

The inhabitants of Eyam, Derbyshire, initiated a quarantine to control a Black Death outbreak in 1665—for fourteen months, no one was allowed into or out of the town. Only a quarter of the citizens survived. One local farmer, Elizabeth Hancock, was forced to bury her husband, along with six of her seven children, over an eight-day period in August 1666.

Voices In Time

c. 2001 | Knoxville

Examining the Cadavers

Mary Roach visits a decay facility.More

Voices In Time

c. 1360 | Shiraz

The Caged Bird Sings

Hafez seeks a heavenly home.More

Voices In Time

c. 1573 | Aquitaine

Living at Life’s Expense

Montaigne considers death and life.More

Charts & Graphs

Spoiler Alert

Murders, accidents, and suicides from novels and films.

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Black and white photograph of Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

Black and white photograph of American surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland.

Oil painting portrair Michel de Montaigne in red robes and white collar

Contributors

Painted portrait of Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Black and white photograph of Bolshevik officer Yakov Yurovsky.

Color photograph of American poet and critic Paul Zweig.

If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself.

—Saint Augustine, c. 420