Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial by Penny Colman

Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial by Penny Colman was a book I stumbled upon while doing research for the 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge. I would recommend trying to get a physical copy of the book because a lot of the charm of the book is in the photographs. In this book, Colman looks at death through varying cultural lenses, from how we approach death to how we treat bodies. 

If you've read Mary Roach's Stiff or Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, you're unlikely to be surprised by anything in this book, but there were several things that were new to me and I liked the personal photographs she took. I thought they added a certain charm to the book, which really felt more like a scrapbook of someone's research on a topic that they were interested in, rather than a rigorous examination of a topic. She'd introduce a topic and give it a paragraph's worth of attention before moving on to the next topic, so it never really went in-depth, but was still worth a perusal, I think.

3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

In modern times the task of determining if a person is dead has become more complicated...Today the most widely accepted definition is "death by whole brain criteria," which means complete loss of function in the neocortex - the part of the brain that contains thoughts, perceives pain and pleasure, and controls voluntary actions - and in the brainstem, which controls breathing, wakefulness, and blood pressure. (page 23-24)

This was shortly after a chapter about being buried alive and I want dead/not dead to be much more of a bright line than it really is. Ha!

"Not only do insects swarm over an exposed corpse in great numbers, but they also arrive in a very precise sequence depending upon the body's location and condition," Iserson writes. "Since the exact feeding pattern varies with a body's location, the time of death, and the climate, forensic entomologists are often able to determine the date of death very accurately - even a decade later." (page 49)

Sometimes I wonder if I should just change jobs entirely and do interesting fieldwork like forensic entomologists must do!

The French poet Alfred de Musset expressed his request in a poem:
My dear friends, when I am dead

Plant a willow at the cemetery,

I love its weeping foliage,

Its pallor is sweet and dear to me,

And its shadow will be light

Upon the earth where I sleep.

De Musset was buried at Pere Lachaise, and his friends planted a willow. Unfortunately, willows don't thrive in the soil at the cemetery. After the American author Willa Cather visited the grave, she wrote: "De Musset certainly never got anything that he wanted in life, and it seems a sort of fine-drawn irony that he should not have the one poor willow he wanted for his grave." (page 154-155)

Poor du Musset. This made me feel terrible for him.