What Disease Killed King Herod?
The life of Herod the Great king of ancient Judea was the stuff of legend, but the cause of his grisly death more than 2,000 years ago has been a mystery. Now, after studying ancient accounts of Herod’s death, Jan Hirschmann, a physician at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, thinks the king probably died of chronic kidney disease, complicated by a particularly nasty case of gangrene. Hirschmann revealed his findings last week at the Historical Clinical Pathology Conference, held at a University of Maryland medical center in Baltimore.
