Man-made Death: A Neglected Mortality

HERMAN Biggs, an American pioneer in public health, identified "the reduction in the death rate" as "the principal statistical expression and index of human and social progress."²InTwentieth Century Book of the Dead,¹a seminal but neglected 1972 study, Scottish writer Gil Elliot distinguishes between biologic death—death from natural causes directly—and man-made death—death from war, political violence, and their attendant privations. Historians and statisticians seldom have examined man-made death beyond counting the number of combatants killed, Elliot notes, although "the scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our time."1(p6)Elliot's "nation of the dead," 100 million corpses, challenges that evasion with a powerful metaphor. Statistics on homicide and other unofficial violence locate and enumerate "private" man-made deaths for sociological examination and for comparison among political entities— cities, regions, and nations—by quality of life. By contrast, "public" man-made death is