WatchtowerLabs

The Fevered Past

History EN ↓ 3 episodes

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...

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WatchtowerLabs

Episodes

The Mad King Charles 12.06.2026 1:08:09

Patreon Link: https://www.patreon.com/TheFeveredPast In 1392, the King of France rode out of a forest near Le Mans, killed four of his own knights, and had to be wrestled to the ground by his uncle. He was twenty-three. He had been on the throne for twelve years. He would remain on it for another thirty. Charles VI of France, called the Beloved by his people and the Mad by history, suffered the fi...

The Death of Alexander the Great 29.05.2026 1:16:46

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 mo...

The Plague of Athens 16.05.2026 58:31

In the summer of 430 BCE, something horrific tore through Athens. The city was at war with Sparta, packed beyond capacity with refugees from the countryside, and entirely unprepared for what came through its gates next. Within four years, perhaps a quarter of the population was dead, including the man who had led Athens into the war. We have an eyewitness account of the disease from Thucydides, wh...