Abstract

The relation between birthday and date of death has so far been studied from two different perspectives: birthdays were either conceived of as emotionally invested deadlines motivating people to ward off their death which causes a 'dip' in death rates before their birthday, or they were considered as stressful events leading to an increase of mortality on or after their birthday. Using a collection of biographies of famous people from the whole world and another of well-known Swiss citizens we tested hypotheses derived from these assumptions. Neither the 'death-dip' hypotheses nor the 'birthday stress' hypothesis was supported by our results.