Depictions of historical crises would seem incomplete without reference to the toll of the dead that the disaster left in its wake. Though mortality offers a simple, if grim, metric to gauge the magnitude of historical calamity, the power of death as a construct presents challenges to the accurate analysis of disease and disaster events. Contemporaneous death estimates were rarely accurate, and when provided, they frequently contributed figurative or narrative value to the writer’s audience that superseded the truth value of the numbers provided. While a reliance on death tolls might be evocative, uncritical reliance on such figures risks biasing the historical record and misrepresenting the nature of crisis events. This paper evaluates the use and misuse of death in crisis literature, using the primary and secondary accounts of the Lebanese Famine of World War I as a case study. In the aftermath of the war, various observers ventured death estimates that ranged from roughly 20 percent to half of Mount Lebanon’s population. Statistical collection methods at the time were unreliable, but the disagreement over numbers owed more to the figurative meaning that mortality offered to sympathetic readers. Sometimes this meaning was political, like in the selective use of statistics by pro-French or pro-Ottoman partisans in the postwar political discourse, but even ostensibly neutral accounts of the famine frequently used death and dead bodies as literary intensifiers in written depictions to show the severity of the crisis when simple words fell short. However, death is a value-laden concept that conveys deep and complex meaning for both authors and their audiences, and as such, historians must consider death’s literary and semiotic value when studying past disasters – it is not a mere fact. When writers invoked death and the dead, they did so with some intent: to generate sympathy, to solicit humanitarian donations, or simply to validate their own subjective interpretations of the famine’s dark landscape. Both the statistical variability of death tolls and the affective use of death in famine literature indicate that mortality is far too potent a concept to be invoked as a casual metric in crisis scholarship. The use of death statistics may be evocative, but using them without caution risks writing subjective values into the historiography that alter how we understand those disasters in the present.