Nullius in Bonis

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In the early 1900s, a train company left a coffin in the rain, resulting in “mutilation” of the corpse. The widow sought damages, which raised a poignant question: Who owns a corpse? An earlier case had held that once it’s buried a corpse belongs to the ground; a person who dug it up improperly would be guilty merely of trespass. But another case had deemed a corpse “quasi-property”: It may belong to no one, but certainly the kin have an interest in it. Joseph Henry Lumpkin of the Georgia Supreme Court wrote:

Death is unique. It is unlike aught else in its certainty and its incidents. A corpse in some respects is the strangest thing on earth. A man who but yesterday breathed and thought and walked among us has passed away. Something has gone. The body is left still and cold, and is all that is visible to mortal eye of the man we knew. Around it cling love and memory. Beyond it may reach hope. It must be laid away. And the law — that rule of action which touches all human things — must touch also this thing of death. It is not surprising that the law relating to this mystery of what death leaves behind cannot be precisely brought within the letter of all the rules regarding corn, lumber and pig iron.

The court ruled in favor of the widow, and this view is widely held today: The survivors have the right to take possession of a body and dispose of it.

| Death · Society

The Hanging Coffins of Sagada

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the Philippine municipality of Sagada, the Igorot people suspend coffins on wooden beams in the face of a cliff, both to protect them from floods and animals and to bring them closer to heaven. In a tradition more than 2,000 years old, the elderly fashion their own coffins out of hollow logs, to be fitted into place by their survivors. The practice is now slowly dying away.

“It’s like returning back to where you came from, in the foetal position in the womb,” Igorot guide Siegrid Bangyay told the BBC in 2018. Though the last cliff burial had taken place in 2010, she said, she would one day like to take a place on the cliff herself — changing from “a tourist guide to a tourist attraction.”

| Death

Part Two

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1907, two years after Jules Verne’s death, sculptor Albert Roze added a striking monument to Verne’s grave in the cemetery of La Madeleine in Amiens: a sculpture of the author smashing his tombstone, shedding his shroud, and hoisting himself toward the sky.

The work is called Toward Immortality and Eternal Youth, and the face is Verne’s own — Roze used the author’s death mask.

| Death · Literature

Podcast Episode 360: Haggard’s Dream

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In 1904, adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard awoke from a dream with the conviction that his daughter’s dog was dying. He dismissed the impression as a nightmare, but the events that followed seemed to give it a grim significance. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Haggard’s strange experience, which briefly made headlines around the world.

We’ll also consider Alexa’s expectations and puzzle over a college’s name change.

See full show notes …

| Death · History · Literature · Oddities · Podcast

“Epitaph on Fop, A Dog Belonging to Lady Throckmorton”

Though once a puppy, and though Fop by name,
Here moulders one, whose bones some honour claim;
No sycophant, although of spaniel race,
And though no hound, a martyr to the chase.
Ye squirrels, rabbits, leverets, rejoice!
Your haunts no longer echo to his voice;
This record of his fate exulting view,
He died, worn out with vain pursuit of you.

“Yes” — the indignant shade of Fop replies —
“And worn with vain pursuit man also dies.”

— William Cowper, 1792

| Death · Poems

An Antarctic Disappearance

On the morning of May 8, 1965, physicist Carl R. Disch departed the radio noise building of Antarctica’s Byrd Station to return to the main complex 7,000 feet away. He would be walking through a snowstorm with winds of 35 mph, but a hand-line had been installed connecting the two installations so that scientists wouldn’t lose their way.

When Disch didn’t arrive at the main station in a reasonable time, a search party was organized. This spotted his trail but had to return to the station to refuel, and by the time they returned the trail had been covered by drifting snow. The area was searched extensively and the station lighted to increase its visibility, but Disch was never found.

During the search, temperatures dropped to -79 degrees Fahrenheit. The search was called off on May 14. Disch is presumed dead, but his body has never been found.

| Death

The Billups Neon Crossing Signal

After numerous accidents where the Illinois Central Railroad crossed Highway 7 near Grenada, Mississippi, in the 1930s, inventor Alonzo Billups came up with a one-of-a-kind solution. When a train approached the crossing, motorists were confronted with a lighted skull and crossbones, the glowing words “Stop-DEATH-Stop,” flashing neon arrows indicating the train’s direction, and an air raid siren.

The video here is a simulation; the actual gantry was removed due to a scarcity of neon in the war years. But two photographs survive.

| Death · Oddities · Technology

Justified Killing

Self-defense is widely accepted as a valid reason to use deadly force. But why is it valid? Most other kinds of killing arouse strong moral and political controversy: capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, war, even the killing of animals. But debates about self-defense tend to accept its basic legitimacy. Even those who oppose national self-defense as a justification for war may accept the same principle in a conflict between individuals.

“Not only is self-defense uniquely uncontroversial as a form of killing, but the lack of controversy persists despite the absence of any plausible account as to why it is justified,” writes philosopher Whitley R.P. Kaufman in Justified Killing (2009). “The strength and unanimity with which the assumption that killing in self-defense is morally and legally permissible is held suggest that there must be some powerful and persuasive rationale justifying such killing. But if there is such a rationale, moral philosophy has yet to find it.”

| Death · Society

The Emaciated Child

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We now and then hear of some interesting discovery, but seldom of one more affecting to the sense of humanity than that which was made three weeks ago. In one of the narrow streets [of Pompeii] were found signs of human remains in the dried mud lying on the top of the strata of lapilli reaching to the second floor of the houses; and when the usual process of pouring plaster of Paris into the hollow left by the impression of a body had been accomplished, there came to light the form of a little boy, seemingly about twelve years old. Within the house, opposite to the second floor window of which this infantile form lay, were found a gold bracelet and the skeleton of a woman, the arms stretched towards the child. The plaster form of this woman could not be obtained, the impression being too much destroyed. It is evident that the mother, when the fiery mass descended, had put her little boy out of the window in the hope of saving him, and he must, no doubt have been overwhelmed. The position of the left leg, indeed, seems to show that the child had lost one foot, or that it had been hurt of lamed, which may have been done by the burning substance that quickly overspread the floors of the house and the pavement on the street. Some think the boy was actually being raised and carried in his mother’s arms, at the moment when both finally perished. His left arm is close to the chest, as though wrapped in his toga or mantle, while the right arm (which has been broken off above the wrist, in digging out the figure) was somewhat uplifted. There is a protuberance on the face, which seems to have been caused by his putting a finger to his mouth, to clear off the suffocating matter that pressed upon him in his last moments of life.

— Illustrated London News, March 11, 1882, via Eugene J. Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 2010

| Death · History

Above It All

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When you are flying, everything is all right or it is not all right. If it is all right there is no need to worry. If it is not all right one of two things will happen. Either you will crash or you will not crash. If you do not crash there is no need to worry. If you do crash one of two things is certain. Either you will be injured or you will not be injured. If you are not injured there is no need to worry. If you are injured one of two things is certain. Either you will recover or you will not recover. If you recover there is no need to worry. If you don’t recover you can’t worry.

— W.E. Johns, Spitfire Parade, 1941

| Death · Literature · Technology