19th century

(Newser) - Need a break from the holiday cheer? At the BBC , Jeremy Clay offers a list of weird and horrifying 19th-century deaths, which from the vantage point of centuries later are also darkly amusing. Among them:

• After causing a stir in a London factory in 1875, a mouse literally killed a

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(Newser) - It's been more than a century since Joseph Merrick—the so-called Elephant Man—died at age 27, but researchers still can't definitively explain the huge growths on his body. Though he was nicknamed after the parasitic infection Elephantiasis, other scientists believe he may have suffered from the congenital...

(Newser) - A veteran of 40 Civil War skirmishes and battles kept one secret under wraps: her breasts. Union Army soldier Albert Cashier was really Jennie Hodgers, one of hundreds of women who fought in the war. "The country needed men, and I wanted excitement," Hodgers said. She also benefited...

(Newser) - Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell ripped off the idea from his rival Elisha Gray, a new book claims. In The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret, journalist Seth Shulman uncovers evidence that Bell took a sneak peek at Gray's patent documents with the help of his lawyers and a...