George Washington likely died because his doctors enthusiastically drained forty percent of his blood

A closer look

The man who miraculously survived the Revolutionary War was ultimately brutally murdered by standard 18th-century healthcare. Suffering from a harsh throat infection in 1799, Washington's top physicians treated him by aggressively employing bloodletting. Believing bad humors were trapped in his veins, they drained roughly 80 ounces of blood from the 67-year-old president in under twelve hours, immediately sending him into fatal hemorrhagic shock.