A quiz question · medium
True or false: Frederick, Prince of Wales died in 1751 from being struck on the chest by a cricket ball.
False. The cricket-ball story appears in the memoirs of Lord Hervey (his political enemy, published posthumously in 1848) and was repeated by Victorian historians for over a century. The 1751 autopsy by royal physician Frank Nicholls actually found a pleural empyema — a chronic respiratory abscess, almost certainly from tuberculosis. There was no external chest injury at all. The cricket ball was invention.
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The Heir Who Was Not Killed by a Cricket Ball Frederick, Prince of Wales died in March 1751, aged forty-four. The story that a cricket ball had killed him survived for two centuries. His lungs had killed him.
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