10 Authors Who Died In Mysterious Or Strange Ways

Francis Bacon, not the 20th century painter of screaming popes, but the 16th/17th century philosopher, scientist, and author, and father of the scientific method. He thought that scientific knowledge should only be based on inductive reasoning (the same inductive reasoning employed by Sherlock Homes) and the careful observation of nature.

So how did this brilliant and respected wise man come to his end? He caught pneumonia trying to stuff a chicken with snow.

It was 9 April 1626. It had been snowing in London. Francis Bacon and the king’s physician were traveling through Highgate. Bacon suddenly had the idea that it might be possible to preserve meat with snow. There was no time to waste. Francis wanted to try the experiment at once and so the two men jumped out of the carriage at the bottom of Highgate Hill where they bought a chicken from a poor woman and had her disembowel the feathered creature. Francis stuffed it with snow and became almost immediately ill.

To quote John Aubrey, who wrote about the event in his book, Brief Lives:

“The Snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his Lodging but went to the Earle of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into a damp bed that had not been layn-in which gave him such a cold that in two or three days as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation."