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    101 Amazing Unusual Deaths
    101 Amazing Unusual Deaths
    101 Amazing Unusual Deaths
    Ebook58 pages45 minutes

    101 Amazing Unusual Deaths

    By Jack Goldstein

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    About this ebook

    Death is the one thing about life we can be sure of. But exactly how we shuffle off this mortal coil is another story altogether. Whilst the boring among us may well drift off in our sleep, and the unlucky suffer painfully in some horrible accident, very occasionally death will come in such an unusual way as to be particularly noteworthy. Ever since the politician Draco was suffocated by the gifts an appreciative audience showered him with in the 7th century BC, the fates have generously woven their magic to ensure that members of the human race have gone to meet the choir invisible in ever more interesting circumstances. This book examines over one hundred such cases, where the unexpected is the norm and the bizarre commonplace. From the humorous to the tragic and the gruesome, prepare yourself for a morbid trip through the kind of material you know the coroners secretly share at their Christmas parties...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJack Goldstein Books
    Release dateAug 2, 2017
    ISBN9781785387302
    101 Amazing Unusual Deaths

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      Book preview

      101 Amazing Unusual Deaths - Jack Goldstein

      version.

      Long, Long Ago...

      In the 7th Century BC, a politician by the name of Draco became the first legislator (someone who writes laws) of ancient Athens in Greece. Although his role arose as a result of citizens asking for someone to draw up certain laws, their plan backfired somewhat as Draco’s laws ended up being pretty unforgiving - in fact, that’s where we get the word draconian from when referring to a law that is particularly harsh. However, it was not angry citizens who caused his death, but grateful ones. After a speech at a public venue in Aegina, the appreciative audience showered him with gifts of cloaks and hats; unfortunately Draco suffocated to death under their weight.

      Perhaps one of the most famous deaths in ancient Greece was that of the author Aeschylus of Athens, a playwright well-known for his tragedies who was killed by a falling tortoise. Eagles are known to drop tortoises on rocks to smash their shells, thus gaining access to those yummy innards. It is thought that an eagle had dropped the tortoise in question onto Aeschylus’s shiny bald head, mistaking it for a rock. Amazingly, it turns out that the unlucky fellow was only outside in the first place because he had received a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object... so he thought being out in the open would be the best way to avoid such a tragic outcome! In case you’re wondering, sadly history does not record the fate of the tortoise.

      Qin Shi Huang, the emperor of China who gave the world the incredible terracotta army, suffered a painful death due to ingestion of significant amounts of mercury. He hadn’t swallowed the fatal material accidentally however; he had in fact deliberately swallowed a number of pills made out of the poisonous metal in the utterly misguided belief that they would grant him eternal life.

      Many of the deaths listed in this book do seem rather unpleasant, but every now and then it seems that a human departs our plane of existence in an altogether less gruesome way. One example of this is surely Chrysippus, a third century Greek philosopher. He saw a donkey trying to eat figs, and after chuckling to himself a little asked a slave to give the animal some wine with which to wash them down. For some reason he found the sight so amusing that he actually died of laughter. Considering few - if any - have since tried feeding a donkey figs and wine, who knows if he simply had an odd sense of humour... or it could genuinely be the most hilarious thing one could ever witness.

      It seems that Chrysippus was not the only Greek philosopher to expire in unusual circumstances. Heraclitus, also of that persuasion, decided that the modern-day cure for dropsy in 475BC was to smear oneself with cow manure. Sadly for the deep thinker, he didn’t reckon on a pack of dogs being so excited by the funky smell that they devoured him entirely. At least, that’s the story told to us by fellow philosopher Diogenes.

      Figs must have held some humorous significance for previous generations - at least, that’s what might be deduced from the examples of both Chrysippus above and of Martin of Aragon who also kicked the bucket after a bout of uncontrollable laughter. Suffering from indigestion having eaten an entire goose, Martin was pleased to see his favourite jester Borra enter the room. He asked the jester where he had been, and the reply given was "Out of the next vineyard, where I saw a young deer hanging by his

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