Thomas Browne’s curious A Letter to a Friend (op. post. 1690) is an ars moriendi tract organized on early modern medical ideas about consumption, a disease understood as virtually pyral, a metabolic combustion of the body. Browne’s framing of mortality is more elaborately developed in his celebrated Urne-Buriall (1658), a virtuoso’s survey of worldwide mortuary custom throughout history, and a commentary on the impersonal state of human remains in cremation, inhumation, and other styles of corporeal disposal. Composed in the mid-1650s, these two works on the dust and ashes of mortal relics attend to humans' origin in dust in cognate varieties of burning: the reduction of flesh to dust by pyral and febrile flame, and the apocalyptic fires that will consume the world in ashes on the last day. Ash and dust represent the resistless anonymity of people's particulate fate, and produce anomalies of memory: in Urne-Buriall Browne is absorbed by the vagaries of identifiable remains, their random survival or effacement; in the Letter, however, although the disease itself leaves only wasted bodily fragments, the patient’s exemplary life is recorded and memorialized by Browne as a textual monument.