The Fevered Past

In June of 323 BCE, Alexander the Great died in Babylon. He was thirty-two.

He had taken the known world from the Adriatic to the Indus in a decade. He had crossed two continents at the head of an army. He had survived a near-drowning in an icy river, a stone to the head, and an arrow through the lung. And then, over the course of eleven or twelve days, a fever did what no army had managed. The most powerful man on earth was dead before his next campaign began.

We have several accounts of those final days, written by historians who were not there. We have a strange chain of rumors about poisoning, a court full of plausible suspects, and a body that — according to one source — did not begin to decompose for six days.

The suspects are ancient. The arguments are not. 

Creators and Guests

DB
Host
Dylan Barker
MR
Editor
Merandia Gifford, RN
Our medical sanity-checker for The Fevered Past.

What is The Fevered Past?

Some of history's deadliest killers have never been named.

The Fevered Past takes one medical mystery per episode - a plague, the unexplained death of a king, an epidemic that reshaped or annihilated a civilization - and works through it. What the ancient sources say. What modern science has been able to recover. Where the experts agree (or decidedly do not.) and where the honest answer is that we still simply do not know.

Some cases are famous. What killed Alexander the Great in Babylon? Some, less so: What was behind the Sweating Sickness of Tudor England, allowing the rise of Henry VIII and the Anglican Church, before suddenly vanishing?

Each episode opens with a scene placing you directly into the shoes of someone who lived through the period as an observer, lending a human perspective to events hundreds of years removed from the present - then, we begin our investigation.