Rembrandt, Franklin, Freud, Lovelace And Ford: 11 Things You Didn't Know From The 'Book Of The Dead' (PHOTOS)

Two things strike you when you spend time among the dead. The first is just how many of them there are (about 90 billion humans have lived and died over the past 100,000 years). The second is how similar were the challenges they each faced -- and how staggeringly varied and resourceful the responses. The more lives we collected for "The Book of the Dead," the more we started to notice patterns forming. The result was a wall covered in lists of people organized by category. But instead of the usual biographical divisions -- politicians, musicians, artists, etc. -- we decided to choose groupings that focused on how all of us (not just those who feature in school textbooks) live our lives: our relationships to our parents, our illnesses, attitudes to work, culinary and sexual appetites, and our sense (if any) of what it all means.

So, here's our eclectic selection of some of the most successful, happiest, saddest and maddest men and women in history. Many are world famous, others almost completely forgotten: the only criteria for inclusion were that they be both dead -- and interesting.

We hope their struggles will inspire you, or at the very least offer you some comfort from knowing your life is nowhere near as bad as it could be.

Follow the authors on Twitter.

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MARY KINGSLEY (1862 - 1900)

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In 1893, a young unmarried Englishwoman called Mary Kingsley set off for West Africa with one suitcase, a large bowie knife and a revolver. She dressed as she had in London – in a high-collared, floor-length black silk dress with a little hat – and would arrive in remote jungle villages with a cheery ‘It’s only me!’ Unflappable, she fought off crocodiles and leopards; befriended cannibals; ate python; and was one of the first Europeans to see a gorilla. She proved an outstanding field scientist, collecting specimens for the British Museum. Of the sixty-five species of fish she returned with, seven were new to science and three of have since been named after her. Her passion for her subject produced one of the great travel classics, Travels in West Africa (1897) and a one-woman show that attracted audiences in their thousands. She died from typhoid, aged 37, while working as a nurse during the Boer War. Mary’s close study of the Fang people of Gabon had led her to respect a way of life she found preferable, in many ways, to the ‘second-hand rubbishy white culture’ of the colonial administrators and missionaries. She had learnt, she said, to ‘think in black’, enabling her to look on the bright side of cultural practices such as polygamy, even cannibalism. Once, when staying in a Fang hut, a ‘violent smell’ alerted her to a bag suspended from the roof. Emptying the contents into her hat, she found ‘a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears and other portions of the human frame.’ [Image by Adrian Teal]

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In 1893, a young unmarried Englishwoman called Mary Kingsley set off for West Africa with one suitcase, a large bowie knife and a revolver. She dressed as she had in London – in a high-collared, floor-length black silk dress with a little hat – and would arrive in remote jungle villages with a cheery ‘It’s only me!’ Unflappable, she fought off crocodiles and leopards; befriended cannibals; ate python; and was one of the first Europeans to see a gorilla. She proved an outstanding field scientist, collecting specimens for the British Museum. Of the sixty-five species of fish she returned with, seven were new to science and three of have since been named after her. Her passion for her subject produced one of the great travel classics, Travels in West Africa (1897) and a one-woman show that attracted audiences in their thousands. She died from typhoid, aged 37, while working as a nurse during the Boer War.

Mary’s close study of the Fang people of Gabon had led her to respect a way of life she found preferable, in many ways, to the ‘second-hand rubbishy white culture’ of the colonial administrators and missionaries. She had learnt, she said, to ‘think in black’, enabling her to look on the bright side of cultural practices such as polygamy, even cannibalism. Once, when staying in a Fang hut, a ‘violent smell’ alerted her to a bag suspended from the roof. Emptying the contents into her hat, she found ‘a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears and other portions of the human frame.’

[Image by Adrian Teal]

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Comments

[naschkatze]

12:12 AM on 09/30/2010

It is interesting to me that Freud turned to psychoanalysis after his failure studying male eels. (Hah, didn't think of the symbolism before this moment.) Alfred Kinsey's interest in the investigation of sex grew out of his study of gall wasps.

[Woods Shade]

10:30 AM on 09/29/2010

Hadn't heard of Mary Kingsley before... what an incredible story!

[okami]

04:15 PM on 09/28/2010

Benjamin Franklin: ‘the only President of the United States who was never President’

- 'Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him', the Firesign Theater, 1968

glad someone remembered the line; shoulda gave credit.

[hisdroogness]

03:24 PM on 09/28/2010

Dr. Franklin was also an atheist :)

[mathme]

03:52 PM on 09/28/2010

He was a Deist.

[Jerome Morrow]

12:31 PM on 09/28/2010

Ben Franklin. He was the man!!

[Ergon]

11:18 AM on 09/28/2010

George Sand

[3fingerbrown]

10:24 AM on 09/28/2010

They miss the point about Franklin that might be most interesting to contemporary readers: He was a one-man media empire. Author, editor, publisher, and printer of his magazines and almanacs, he even got himself appointed postmaster, deciding when his publications (and his competitors') got delivered, and for how much. Taking together Franklin's creative, entrepreneurial, and governmental roles, he's got to be considered the most important figure in American media history.

[blisster]

11:03 AM on 09/28/2010

I wholeheartedly concur, a transitory human being. One of the people with which, I wish I could have had a conversation. F&F for your comment and your moniker.

[Jerome Morrow]

12:31 PM on 09/28/2010

Franklin inspired me more than any other. F & F'd.

[fahrenheit451]

10:16 AM on 09/28/2010

Ben rules!

[AristophanesJones]

09:56 AM on 09/28/2010

Mary Kingsley: Gonna have to 5 cannibal-sympathizer lady.

Henry Ford: BFF's with Hitler, so F him.

Ben Franklin: SO HOOD

[tobynsaunders]

09:40 AM on 09/28/2010

What IS it with the English? I'm being rhetorical: on islands, particular traits get inbred & increased in frequency in ways that aren't seen on mainlands... for better or worse, that's what happens.

[tobynsaunders]

09:29 AM on 09/28/2010

Ford was vegetarian! That's great, compared to omnivorism, that's great!

[texasprogressive]

10:10 AM on 09/28/2010

Unfortunately, Ford was also extremely anti-Semitic which was why Hitler admired him so much.

[tobynsaunders]

09:26 AM on 09/28/2010

Yes, on that Freud note: hard central nervous stimulants increase brain activity then take it down to a reduced level, revealing the 'inner child'... like, with meth, it destroys the brains 'higher thinking' parts (for a time, depending on use-amount/frequency) & leaves one with only this 'inner child'... it is nightmarish... it's like going back in time... really disgusting... horrific. His coke habit would have given him the ability to think at an increased rate & then come-down & experience consciousness at a reduced rate: it can be very telling, although unimaginably destructive & painful! I highly recommend against ANY hard central nervous system stimulants! Adderall, cocaine & its synthetic version called Ritalin, methamphetamine... all of them are too dangerous!

[Superb1]

09:14 AM on 09/28/2010

Old Ben died of syphilis.

[3fingerbrown]

10:26 AM on 09/28/2010

Make sure he washes his hands before he sits down to dinner with Lisa and Mark Twain.

[mathme]

04:02 PM on 09/28/2010

I have never seen any credible evidence of this (and most of the evidence is to the contrary-- burst artery in his lung). If you have any, I'd like to see it, because that would be... um... well... sort of fitting considering all of that action he got :) He lived so long, though, that he would have been showing some pretty horrendous signs of the disease (or have gone insane from the disease or the "treatment" of "quicksilver").

[Woods Shade]

10:27 AM on 09/29/2010

Good points, appreciated.

[Lisa Shields]

08:57 AM on 09/28/2010

Old Ben will forever be on my list of Great folks I would love to have over for dinner...right next to Mark Twain...