Insects and death intersect in art, poetry, forensics

The origin point: The first case of insects being used to point to a killer dates to the 13th century, and the murder of a farmer in rural China.|nvestigators of the time could tell that the man had been murdered with a sickle, but in a village full of rice farmers and sickles, it was proving impossible to tell which one, the Chinese physician and death investigator Sung Tzhu writes, in his 1247 book Hsi Yuan Chi Lu (The Washing Away of Wrongs).Since searches and questioning had failed, the local judge decided to try a different tack.

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He called upon all the rice field workers to lay their sickles on the ground. One began to attract flies. Hordes of them.Confronted, the owner of the sickle confessed. This case is said to mark the earliest point in the history of forensic entomology.Art: By the time of the Renaissance, with its growing fascination with anatomical studies of the human body, elements of forensic entomology were showing up on canvas. Take the woodcut series The Dance of Death by the 16th century German artist Hans Holbein the Younger. The macabre visuals depict Death as a skeletonised individual paying surprise visits to all kinds of people — a pope, a physician, a ploughman, a knight, a sailor.In one revelry-filled depiction, skeletons dance and play a drum around a corpse, as tiny snake-like creatures dangle aroun