13 Things You Didn't Know About: Death

1) Shark attacks are an insignificant cause of death, with only about 10 fatalities each year worldwide.

2) By contrast, roughly 150 people are killed annually by coconuts.

3) The pen is mightier than the sword(fish): roughly 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.

4) Some animals can be very deadly, though, but often not the ones you think: fleas wiped out 25-40% of Europe's population during the Dark Ages by spreading the Black Death.

5) Mosquitoes are even more lethal: they have been responsible for more human deaths than all the wars in all of history combined.

6) Don't count out humans: the statistical probability of being murdered is about 1 in 20,000.

7) However, a person is 5 times more likely to be killed by a medical error than by a gun.

8) President Garfield, for example, was killed less by assassin Charles Guiteau's bullet so much as by the infection caused by doctors treating him without sterile precautions: he lived for 80 days after being shot before succumbing to septicemia.

9) One of those present when President Garfield was shot was also connected to the assassination of two other Presidents: the son of a slain President, Robert Todd Lincoln was also present at the 1901 World's Fair in Buffalo, NY, when President McKinley was fatally wounded, at the President's personal invitation.

10) Thomas Edison's final experiment involved his own death - he had Henry Ford capture his dying breath in a bottle for study. The breath is still around; it's kept at the Henry Ford Museum.

11) The idea that the human soul has mass that can be measured at the moment of death, popularized in a Dan Brown novel and the movie 21 Grams, was first put forth by Dr. Duncan MacDougall in 1907 - more than a century later, no researcher has ever managed to reproduce Dr. MacDougall's highly controversial results.

12) Forensic Dentistry is as old as the United States: during the Revolutionary War, none other than Paul Revere - a silversmith, when he wasn't busy with midnight rides - made the first recorded identification of a body by dental records when he recognized work he'd done himself with silver wire on a late patient's teeth.

13) Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, correctly predicted his own death: born under Halley's Comet, he prophecied that his life would end when the comet came again - he was right.

Sources:

National Museum of Health & Medicine

Roadside America

Snopes.com

The New York Times