Despite the literally morbid title, there’s an optimistic feel throughout Andrew Doig’s new volume on the history of death, This Mortal Coil. While the conclusion isn’t quite that death shall have no dominion, advances in medicine and public health and rising prosperity across the world mean that arrival at death’s domain takes far longer for today’s average human being than, for instance, a peasant in medieval Europe.

A professor of biochemistry, Doig approaches the question of death from a variety of angles: how the history of recording death fed into the modern disciplines of epidemiology and sociology, how changing social conditions mean that these days we die of very different causes to people only a century ago, explaining the biology of various ways in which we can die, before concluding by examining the ways in which we may die in the future.

Through sections on various infectious diseases, the rise of heart disease, cancers, and dementia as the most common causes of death in the 21st century, and the link between death rates and birth rates, Doig arrives at the almost inevitable conclusion by the end of This Mortal Coil: how we die has a surprisingly profound influence over how we live.