The chapter discusses ancient and modern treatments of Alexander’s death. It describes the omens said to foretell his death and their cultural and historical background, treating ancient versions of what led to Alexander’s death and attempts by historians and scientists to detect the working of poison, conspiracy, or less-violent and sinister causes. The rest of the chapter focuses on Alexander’s so-called last plans, their authenticity, the reasons for their rejection, and the contentious history of his body and burial.

In the nineteenth century the corpse became central to medical education. In Britain, a growing number of private medical schools opened throughout the country, involving the rise of the demand for dead bodies. It is exactly around the same time that Gothic fiction was revamped and offered insights into the debates around medical practice and education. This chapter explores the links between the field of anatomy and the development of Gothic fiction in Britain in the nineteenth century. It points out how the Gothic dealt with medical practitioners’ treatment of the corpse and how Gothic narratives dramatised the tension between the stealing, cutting up, preservation, and exhibition of human remains in medical collections and the central part played by anatomical knowledge in medical science. By looking at texts by John Galt, Mary Shelley, and Samuel Warren, as well as Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson, this chapter not only shows how literary texts capitalised on the Gothic paraphernalia to foreground the regulation (or lack thereof) of the practice of anatomy before the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act, but also highlights how the Gothic enabled authors to record cultural responses to medical practice throughout the century.

The formal, ritual laments in the Iliad provide both a particularly well-developed example of ritualized speech and a thematic linchpin of the way the Iliad tells its tale of the universality of sorrow and bereavement in war.