What’s your dust worth?
Steven Shapin: Corpses, 14 April 2011
After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver
by Norman Cantor.
Georgetown, 372 pp., £18.75, December 2010,978 1 58901 695 8 Show More
by Norman Cantor.
Georgetown, 372 pp., £18.75, December 2010,
“... When I was a boy – on this evidence, a miserable, maudlin sort of child – I used to kill time by calculating the value of a human life. Not the value of your soul or your contribution to civilisation or your lifetime earnings or your insurable value or the sums your heirs might realise in a wrongful death suit. I was interested in what a life’s worth when broken down into the stuff it’s made of, its bits and pieces, when to dust it hath returned ... ”