Cotard’s delusion was first described in 1882 by Dr. Jules Cotard, who called it “the negation delirium”; few instances of the disorder have been discovered since. Case reports can be found here and there—the story, for example, of a fifty-three-year-old Filipino woman who had recently immigrated to the United States, who “[complained] that she was dead, smelled like rotting flesh, and wanted to be taken to a morgue so that she could be with dead people.”
