Illness and Death
For most of 1856, Miller suffered severe headaches and the most probable diagnosis is of psychotic depression. Victorian-era medicine did not help. He feared that he might harm his wife or children because of persecutory delusions.
Miller committed suicide, shooting himself in the head with a revolver in his house on Tower Street, Portobello, on the night he had finished checking printers' proofs for his book on Scottish fossil plants and vertebrates, The Testimony of the Rocks. Before his death, he wrote a poem called Strange but True.
A shocked Western world mourned him, and his funeral procession was among the largest in the memory of Edinburgh residents.
He is buried in the Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh.
Read more about this topic: Hugh Miller
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