ABSTRACT
A book on the deaths of the rulers of England 1 was reviewed in The Lancet 2 and its author congratulated on his courage in diagnosing the causes of death on what, in many cases, is very slender and unreliable testimony. The mortality statistics for the rulers from the Norman Conquest to the death of King Edward VII, including Richard Cromwell and Lady Jane Grey are outlined below.
No fewer than eight died violent deaths, either in battle or at the hands of the murderer or headsman. Acute infections and cardiovascular-renal disease have each accounted for six; syphilis, congenital or acquired, and ‘dysentery’, which covers a multitude of ignorances, have each disposed of four. ‘Senile decay’, a diagnosis no longer accepted as a certified cause of death, is mentioned in three cases and implied in one other. Stephen may have had an appendix abscess, Edward III gonorrhoea, and Richard II anorexia nervosa, but Henry I’s ‘surfeit of lampreys’ was probably ptomaine poisoning. George IV and William IV, pathologically speaking, had much in common; both had hepatic cirrhosis, pericarditis and probably pneumonia. Those who think harshly of James I will do well to bear in mind that he had Bright’s disease, enlarged tonsils, renal calculi, jaundice, haemorrhoids, dental caries and pyorrhoea, and arthritis—surely enough to sour any man.
