>>11882375Good /lit/ related question. No less a personage than H.L. Mencken once wrote an essay on the exact same problem, and with the same lament. I'm going to try to find a better link but if you ctrl+f "public library" on the following link you can start reading a choppy plaintext hack on the essay I'm referring to:
https://archive.org/stream/mencken017105mbp/mencken017105mbp_djvu.txt"Go to any public library and look under 'Death: Human' in the card index, and you will be surprised to find how few books there are on the subject. Worse, nearly all the few are by psychical researchers who regard death as a mere removal from one world to another or by mystics who appear to believe that it is little more than a sort of illusion. Once, seeking to find out what death was physiologically that is, to find out just what happened when a man died I put in a solid week without result. There seemed to be nothing whatever on the subject, even in the medical libraries. Finally, after much weariness I found what I was looking for in Dr. George W. Crile's 'Man: An Adaptive Mechanism'. Crile said that death was acidosis that it was caused by the failure of the organism to maintain the alkalinity necessary to its normal functioning and in the absence of any proofs or even argument to the contrary I accepted his notion forthwith and have cherished it ever since."
