Deaths of Famous People

Florence Nightingale founded modern nursing, reformed the British public health system, improved military medicine and dedicated her life to caring for the sick. She earned her reputation by caring for wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War. In 1854, she arrived in Turkey with a group of 38 volunteer nurses that she had trained.

Jim Bouton was not good enough to play on his high school baseball team but ended up as a professional All-Star baseball pitcher with the New York Yankees who won both of his starts in the 1964 World Series.  He was also a best-selling author, movie actor, and sportscaster and one of the creators...

Babe Didrikson Zaharias was named the best female athlete of the 20th century.  In the 1932 Olympics, she became the only track and field athlete, male or female, ever to win individual Olympic medals in a running, throwing and jumping event. She set four world records: • She won the 80-meter hurdles in a world-record 11.7 seconds and breaking her previous world-record she set in a preliminary heat.

Diego Maradona was widely regarded as one of the greatest soccer players of all time. He could dribble the ball through an entire opposing team and could kick the ball where the goalie couldn’t reach it.

George Gershwin was arguably America’s greatest composer of Broadway musicals and movie film scores, and was always the bon vivant of every party he attended. He wrote the enormously successful “Swanee” at age nineteen. He was a playboy who rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous, and was also a natural athlete and a...

In spite of stuttering from age three onward, Mel Tillis became a world-famous singer and songwriter, movie actor and television host. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1976 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2007.

Gregg Allman was a very famous musician, singer and songwriter who, together with his brother, founded The Allman Brothers Band, one of the top bands in America in the late 1960s and the 1970s. He wrote and played top hit songs including "Midnight Rider," "Melissa," “Whipping Post," "Trouble No More," "Blue Sky," "Ramblin’ Man" and "Dreams."

Robert Durst was a fabulously wealthy heir to one of the most powerful real estate companies in New York City, and a convicted murderer and suspected-serial killer who avoided appropriate punishment for more than 40 years by changing his name, disguising his face, moving from place to place, and finally dying while waiting for an appeal.

Lydia Pinkham’s black cohosh tonic was one of the top selling patent medicines back in 1875, almost 150 years ago, and today many women still buy it to treat their hot flushes of menopause, even though it has been largely discredited by the medical community.  One double-blind study showed that it is no more effective for controlling menopausal hot flushes than a placebo sugar pill.

Perhaps the most amazing mathematician of all time was Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan (1887-1920). He worked out incredibly complicated problems and expanded our knowledge of elliptic functions, continued fractions and infinite series. During his 32 years of life, he wrote about nearly 4000 math problems and almost all of his solutions have proven to be...

At 7 feet, 7.5 inches, Neil Fingleton was the tallest man in the United Kingdom. He played basketball at the University of North Carolina and Holy Cross College and as a pro in the United States, Spain, China, Italy, Greece and England. He later became an actor who played Mag the Mighty in the HBO fantasy series, Game of Thrones and the villain, The Fisher King, in BBC’s Doctor Who.