We have developed a vast, macabre bureaucracy to answer the question of why we die. Illustration from Oxford Science / Getty

It starts with a dead body, as so many mysteries do. A middle-aged man is found unconscious and rushed to a hospital. For four days, he lingers in a coma; on the fifth, he dies. The clues are few and dark and point in different directions. The man was a drug addict. He was diabetic. Some of his family members say that he acted strangely the last time they saw him conscious. Others disagree. The lab tests are inconclusive. Everything is inconclusive. If this were a mystery of the Conan Doyle kind, there would be a detective, and there would be a solution. In the event, there is neither. Instead, there is a young doctor, in her first year on the job, and there is a single piece of paper: a death certificate, on which she is meant to record, precisely and for posterity, why this person died.

Not every mystery involves a dead body, but every dead body is a mystery. Death is an assassin with infinite aliases, and the question of what kills us is tremendously complex. It is also tremendously labile. We ask it with clinical curiosity and keen it in private grief; we pose it rhetorically and inquire specifically; we address it to everyone from physicians to philosophers to priests. It is as bare as bone and as reverberant as bell metal: Why do we die?

For millennia, our answers to that question were sharply constrained. Lacking any real understanding of the physiological causes of death, we pointed instead to the entities we knew could make things happen: conscious (or putatively conscious) agents. Sometimes that agent was us. We killed one another, obviously; we hexed one another, allegedly; we brought about mortality in general—from Prometheus to Eve, through hubris and through sin. Alternatively, sometimes the agent was death itself. Many early cosmologies include a Grim Reaper, give or take a costume change: Thanatos in Greek mythology, the Hindu Yama, the Angel of Death in the Bible. As a rule, these were agents in the other sense as well: mere instruments of a higher power. For most of history, no matter how we died, we did so at the bidding of God or of the gods.

A correlative of all this agency was passivity. If an omnipotent being wants to kill you, there’s not much you can do about it except beg for mercy—a popular strategy even today. Only after we started looking to the physical world to determine why we die did premodern fatalism begin to fade. Sentient agents yielded to disease agents, divine intercession to medical intervention. Today, “Why do we die?” is one of the fundamental questions of epidemiology, and we have developed a vast and macabre bureaucracy to answer it.

The atomic unit of that bureaucracy is the death certificate. Of all the ways we have ever devised to grapple with our mortality, it is the strangest, least elegiac, and by far the most ambitious. It emerged by an accident of history and evolved to serve two different masters. In part, it is a public-health measure—though even the doctors who deal with death certificates often forget that, regarding them instead as one more piece of paperwork. In part, it is a form of personal identification: the saddest of diplomas, the most mysterious of passports.

And, in part, it is a clue. Of the roughly fifty million people who will die this year, approximately half will get a death certificate. That figure includes every fatality in every developed nation on earth: man, woman, child, infant. The other half, death’s dark matter, expire in the world’s poorest places, which lack the medical and bureaucratic infrastructures for end-of-life documentation. Yet, even with so many people unaccounted for, this number represents the spread of a remarkable idea: that death should be accounted for—that by documenting every single decedent and every possible cause we can solve its mystery.

The antecedent of the modern death certificate emerged in early-sixteenth-century England, in a form known as a Bill of Mortality. The antecedent of the Bill of Mortality does not exist. No earlier civilization we know of kept systematic track of its dead: not ancient Egyptians, for all their elaborate funerary customs; not the Greeks; not the Romans, those otherwise assiduous centralized bookkeepers.

Even Christianity, one of the world’s most successful purveyors of ideas about death, seldom attended to the specifics of why we die. Churches did traditionally keep records of baptisms and burials—and, practically speaking, those serve as a good proxy for births and deaths. But, as a philosophical matter, they are tellingly different: the church was interested in the fate of the soul, not the body. If the goal of life is to gain access to heaven, and death is in God’s hands, there’s no point, and no grace, in dwelling on the particulars of how we die.

That cosmological indifference coincided with scientific ignorance. Early medicine relied more on folklore than on physiology, and its practitioners were not in the habit of examining bodies, living or dead. Well into the nineteenth century, the limits of medical knowledge were such that doctors sometimes didn’t even know if someone had died, let alone how. The widespread terror of being buried alive, which today seems like a dark little wiggle of the id, once reflected a genuine possibility. In the absence of any scientific way to confirm the end of life, it sometimes happened that those consigned to coffins were only mostly dead.

Compounding all this was political irrelevance. Early states had neither the means nor the motive to track individual deaths—or, for that matter, individual anything. Low literacy rates made individual documentation on a broad scale impractical, and reigning administrative practices made it unnecessary. You don’t need a tax I.D. number if taxes are levied on your entire town, and you don’t need a draft card if conscription is collective. Only in exceptional cases did everyday people need to be able to identify themselves—there was, for instance, the vexing premodern problem of how to tell true messengers from false ones—and, accordingly, individual documentation was rare.

The modern death certificate owes its existence to the cosmological, scientific, and political revolutions that eventually overturned this entire world order. But its prototype emerged in response to something else: death itself, on an epic and horrifying scale. In 1347, the Black Death broke out in Europe. By 1351, a third or more of all Europeans were dead. With a huge percentage of the remaining population infectious and the rest of it terrified, the plague turned the formerly private experience of death into a matter of (extreme) public concern. Italy responded by passing the first modern quarantine laws, tracking the living. England took a different route, and began tracking the dead.

Thus the Bills of Mortality: weekly lists of the plague dead, broken down by parish. The earliest known bill is a single handwritten document, thought to date from 1512, which states that in the city of London, between the sixteenth and the twenty-third of November, thirty-four people died of “the plague” and thirty-two of unspecified “oder dyseases.” No information about the dead appeared on early bills, not even their names. And the bills themselves appeared only sporadically: cropping up when the plague did, fading away again when the crisis passed. Their intended purpose seems to have been to help the healthy steer clear of the most infectious parts of town.

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Many of history’s great inventions are really great appropriations—middling ideas if used as intended, brilliant when reoriented or co-opted. In their original form, Bills of Mortality were not a particularly powerful or inspired device. But, in the hundred years after their introduction, two modifications altered both the function of the bills and the future of public health. In 1603, the bills began appearing weekly rather than episodically, and did so continuously for the next two hundred and thirty-three years. In 1629, during a lull in the plague, the court of King James I ordered parish clerks to begin listing deaths from other causes as well. The first change turned the Bills of Mortality into one of history’s richest data sets. The second turned them into a global first: a state-mandated system for recording why we die.