Simon Davis

A weekly roundup of all things relating to death and the morbid....

No one knows what caused the Plague of Athens—but to discover the source of an outbreak millennia after the fact, scientists need victims’ remains and a bit of luck....

(RNS) This may be the year that cremation surpasses burial for the first time in the United States, as a long-standing trend continues....

The Mütter Museum recently discovered it owns the nation's largest collection of books bound in human leather—and now a research team is trying to track down the rest of the world’s examples....

To start with, a lot more people would die from things like measles, mumps, and meningitis....

In 1994, a South Florida man who goes by the name Gelding was surgically castrated. In 2011, he had his penis removed as well. He's a "nullo": A cisgender man who removes his external genitalia completely as a form of body modification, and he recently agreed to answer our questions—from...

Terms like "aid in dying" paint a better picture of end-of-life decisions, and could give people with terminal illnesses a way to work around laws....

Unclaimed bodies are supposed to be buried in marked graves with proper identification, but most end up in mass burial sites, without identification, beside heaps of trash....

Search engine algorithms and laws have made it harder for people to find suicide-related content online, but it's still pretty easy to find explicit instructions on committing suicide from a quick Google search....