The last occasion on which professional scientists took any serious notice of an alchemist's claim to have turned lead into gold happened in 1783. The Royal Society in London called on one of its Fellows, James Price, to show how he had achieved the alchemist's dream. But Price failed to replicate his successful experiment and, before the eyes of three colleagues, drank prussic acid and died.

The worst possible death for a Viking chief was to die peacefully in bed.

100 people a year choke to death on ball-point pens.

In 1662, John Graunt, a London merchant, published the first set of actuarial tables in his book Observations on the Bills of Mortality. Graunt provides many interesting statistics regarding causes of deaths in London in 1632. Seven people are listed as being murdered, 10 people as having died from cancer, and no specific mention is made of heart ailments. On the other hand, 13 people are listed as having died from "planet", 38 from "king's evil", and 98 from "rising of the lights". Possibly the saddest statistic, however, is that out of 9,535 deaths that year, infants made up 2,268 of them, over 23%. (source)

In 1915, statistics were compiled from 18 U.S. states of the number of deaths from three branches of outdoor sport. 16 people were killed in football, 59 in hunting, and 59 in baseball. (source)

Under Massachusetts' Stubborn Child Act of 1654, parents could put their "stubborn" children to death. (source)

Legend has it that Clement VII, pope from 1523 to 1534, was so fond of mushrooms that he made it illegal for anyone else to eat those growing in the Papal States, so that there would never be a shortage for his own table. He died in 1534 from eating a poisonous death cap mushroom. (source)

In 1877, during the height of violent labour unrest in the United States, three men were found guilty of the murder of a foreman of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and sentenced to hang. Two of them went stoically to their deaths, but the third, Alexander Campbell, swore that he was innocent. As he was being dragged from his cell to the gallows, Campbell rubbed his left hand in dust from the floor and pressed his palm against the plaster wall, and shouted repeatedly, "This handprint will remain here for all time as proof of my innocence." Even after Campbell's death, the handprint remained. In 1931, Carbon County Sheriff Robert L. Bowman undertook a renovation of the cell, removing the section of plaster wall containing the handprint, replacing it with a new section of fresh plaster. However, the handprint still came back, and still exists today. (source)

King John of England died in 1216 of over-eating. (source)

During the Third Crusade, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowned while crossing a river in Turkey on horseback. (source)

A few decades ago, when a bus fell into a river just outside New Delhi, all 78 passengers drowned because they belonged to two separate castes, and did not share a rope that would have allowed them to climb to safety. (source)

In 1014, Byzantine emperor Basil II decided to end for once and for all a war that had already lasted forty years. To break the spirit of the hated Bulgarians, he blinded all but 150 of 15,000 prisoners. The "lucky" 150 were blinded in one eye only. Every 100 blind men were guided by a one-eyed leader back to the Bulgarian capital of Ohrid, whose ruler, Samuel, had received word that his army was returning to him. Samuel hastened to meet his men—and found himself staring at thousands of helpless blind men. The sight was fatal. Samuel suffered a stroke on the spot, and died two days later. (Basil II received the title Bulgaroktonis, meaning "slayer of Bulgarians.") (source)

Isaac Newton most likely died from mercury poisoning.

King Alexandros I of Greece (1917-1920) died from blood poisoning after being bitten by his pet monkey. (source)

William the Conqueror died in 1087 after sustaining an abdominal injury from his saddle pommel after falling off his horse at the siege of Mantes. Following his death, the king's noblemen went back to their own estates, and their retainers looted the house where William was lying. Eventually, his body was brought to St. Stephen's church in Caen. During the funeral procession, a fire broke out in the town, and most of the mourners left to try to put it out. When the service began, it was interrupted by a man called Ascelin who announced that he owned the land that was to be William's burial ground but had not been paid. After he was paid, the monks attempted to squeeze William's putrefying body into a stone sarcophagus, but as they were doing that, William's abdomen burst, and an intolerable stench filled the church. (source)

In ancient Egypt, slaves are known to have been murdered to accompany their deceased owners to the afterlife. (source)

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), the first documented conductor, was the first musician to use a baton. It was a heavy, six-foot-long staff that he pounded on the ground in time to the music. One day, at a concert to celebrate the king's return to health, he accidently stuck the staff into his foot. He developed gangrene and died. (source)

The last person to contract smallpox through natural transmission was Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia who contracted it after coming into contact with an infected child in 1977. Maalin survived. In 1978, Janet Parker, an English medical photographer, was exposed to smallpox through a laboratory accident, and subsequently died. The laboratory's virologist felt so guilty that he later committed suicide. On May 8^th, 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated, although some samples remain in laboratories in Atlanta and Moscow. (source)

In 1626, Sir Francis Bacon, one of the most influential minds of his time, was watching a snowstorm. He was struck by the notion that maybe snow could be used to preserve meat. Determined to find out, he purchased a chicken from a nearby village, killed it, and then, standing outside in the snow, tried to stuff the chicken full of snow to freeze it. The chicken never froze, but Bacon caught a cold that turned into pneumonia, and died shortly afterward. (source)

According to legend, Aeschylus, a 5^th B.C. century Greek playright considered to be the father of Greek tragedies, died when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a rock, dropped a tortoise on his head. (source)

Ethiopia's Emperor Menelik II believed that the Bible had curative powers, and he would eat a few pages of it to help restore his health whenever he felt sick. However, he died in 1913 as a result of eating the entire Book of Kings. (source)

In August 1820, an avalanche on Mont Blanc swept a nine-man team of mountaineers into a glacial crevasse on the mountainside. Local people who knew the rate at which the glacier was moving calculated that in 40 years the bodies would appear at the foot of the mountain in the Chamonix valley, some 8 kilometres from where they had died. The bodies appeared in 1861, only a year later than predicted, and still looked "in the bloom of youth", according to some reports.

Around the year 1900, fear of premature burial was very strong. In the early 1900s, Franz Hartmann claimed to have collected around 700 cases of either premature burial or "close calls". In 1896 the "Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial" was founded. In 1897, in Germany, a patent was granted for a device that sent up a warning flag and turned on a light if movement was detected inside the coffin. Modern technology eventually put an end to the premature burial fear. (source)

A common taboo is that royal blood is not to be spilled on the ground, and as a result history records a few unusual methods of executing royals. When Kublai Khan defeated his uncle Nyan, he ordered that Nyan be placed in a carpet and tossed to and fro until he died. In 1688, the king of Siam (now Thailand) ordered that one of his relatives be placed in a large mortar and pounded to death with a huge pestle. (source)

In 1911, Bobby Leech survived a barrel ride over Niagara Falls. After recovering from his injuries, his new-found fame gave him the opportunity to embark on a worldwide lecture tour. In New Zealand, he slipped on a banana peel and died from complications due to the fall. (source)