What Caused the Untimely Death of Alexander the Great?

A caller mentation suggests that the large commandant had contracted the neurological upset Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Credit: Public domain

The untimely decease of Alexander the Great connected June 10, 323 B.C. successful Babylon has agelong been a taxable of blistery statement by historians.

The starring theories arsenic to what killed the 33-year-old warrior—infection, alcoholism, oregon murder—still don’t explicate the information that his assemblage didn’t decompose for six days.

According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine study of 1998, Alexander the Great astir apt died of typhoid fever, which, on with malaria, was communal successful past Babylon.

In the week earlier his death, humanities accounts notation chills, sweats, exhaustion and precocious fever, each emblematic symptoms of infectious diseases, including typhoid fever.

According to David W. Oldach from the University of Maryland Medical Center, Alexander besides had “severe abdominal pain, causing him to outcry retired successful agony.”

Throughout the centuries, suspicions of imaginable poisoning person fallen connected a fig of alleged perpetrators, including 1 of Alexander’s wives, his generals, his illegitimate half-brother, and the royal cup-bearer.

According to historians Andrew N. Williams and Robert Arnott, successful his past days, Alexander was incapable to speak, which was owed to a erstwhile wounded to his cervix during the siege of the Cyropolis.

Alexander the Great’s decease caused uncommon syndrome

New Zealand’s Katherine Hall, a elder lecturer astatine the Dunedin School of Medicine, has travel up with a caller theory: She thinks the assemblage of Alexander wasn’t decomposing due to the fact that helium was, successful fact, inactive alive.

She postulates that the large commandant had contracted the neurological upset Guillain-Barré Syndrome from a communal corruption of the time.

Guillain-Barre is simply a neurological upset causing paralysis passim the body, thing which could person affected his centrifugal nerves.

“So Alexander could precise good person been lying there, incapable to determination a muscle, and really inactive beryllium live due to the fact that they didn’t really instrumentality pulses astatine that clip to find whether radical were dead,” Hall states.

“My mentation really provides a rationale for wherefore helium did not decompose,” she says. “And that being, that helium wasn’t really dormant yet.”

Dr. Hall worked successful intensive attraction units for 5 years and has seen galore patients with Guillain-Barre syndrome.

She believes Alexander whitethorn person been successful a coma with his breathing astir invisible to observers.

“For 1 thing, if my mentation is correct, the past books should beryllium rewritten actually,” Dr. Hall revealed. “Because his day of decease should really beryllium six days aboriginal than what is recorded.”

This is simply a mentation she is preparing to support arsenic the latest section is written successful Alexander the Great’s fascinating beingness story.

Related: What Alexander the Great Really Looked Like