Author: Trisha Leigh Zeigenhorn / Source: did you know?
Considering how long ago he lived, we know quite a bit about the life of Alexander the Great. He was born in 356 BCE in Macedonia, was tutored by Aristotle as a boy, and inherited the throne from his father at the tender age of 20. He’s remembered as one of the greatest generals in human history, after conquering parts of Persia, Asia, Egypt and India.
He was a king, a general, a pharaoh and practically a god by the age of 25, but his death was extraordinary in a totally different way.
The reason for the great man’s demise has been a mystery for all of the intervening 2,000 years. He developed a fever and abdominal pain that soon led to the inability to walk, move, or speak (despite being of sound mind until the moment of his death). But his body didn’t show any signs of decomposition for six days postmortem, and, until recently, no one really knew why.
Theories like poison, liver failure, malaria, and typhoid had all been floated, but Dr. Katherine Hall of the Dunedin School of Medicine recently posited a…
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