These disorders are associated with high uric acid related to diet, age, genetics and possible exposure to lead. Benjamin Franklin died on April 17, when he was 84 years old. The cause of his death was empyema brought by attacks of pleurisy, which he had suffered earlier in his life. Four days after his death his physician Dr. He reported that 16 days before his death he was seized with high fever without particular symptoms until the 4 th day when he complained of pain in his chest, cough and difficulty breathing.
Five days before his death an abscess had formed in his lungs which suddenly burst. Possibly he was relieved. But it seems likely, given his understanding that Deborah and her mother had quickly thrown him over, that he felt at least a tinge of resentment.
If he still had feelings for her, he also knew that her dowry was gone and she was, technically, unmarriageable. He, meanwhile, became more eligible by the year. In June , he launched a printing house with a partner, Hugh Meredith. It seemed that whenever he decided to settle down, Franklin would have his pick of a wife.
Then he had his own romantic calamity: He learned that a young woman of his acquaintance was pregnant with his child. Franklin agreed to take custody of the baby—a gesture as admirable as it was uncommon—but that decision made his need for a wife urgent and finding one problematic.
No desirable young woman with a dowry would want to marry a man with a bastard infant son. There was no ceremony. Soon she took in the infant son her new husband had fathered with another woman and began running a small stationery store on the first floor.
Whether at this point he loved Deborah is difficult to say; despite his reputation as a flirt and a charmer, he seldom made himself emotionally available to anyone. But there are plenty of real-life anecdotes as well. I wish I was near enough to rub it with a light hand. Deborah Franklin wanted a real marriage. And when she became pregnant with their first child, near the beginning of , she had reason to hope she might have one. Her husband was thrilled. By , Franklin had entered the most fulfilling period of his life so far.
His love for Franky had brought him closer to Deborah. Franklin had endured sadness—the death of his brother James, the man who had taught him printing and with whom he had only recently reconciled—and a serious health scare, his second serious attack of pleurisy. But he had survived, and at age 30 was, as his biographer J.
That September 29, a contingent of Indian chiefs representing the Six Nations was heading for Philadelphia to renegotiate a treaty when government officials halted them a few miles short of their destination and advised them to go no farther. No one yet understood that it spread when people inhaled an invisible virus. The disease was fatal in more than 30 percent of all cases and even more deadly to children.
Survivors were often blind, physically or mentally disabled and horribly disfigured. The procedure was a precursor to modern-day vaccination. A doctor used a scalpel and a quill to take fluid from smallpox vesicles on the skin of a person in the throes of the disease. By current estimates, the population of the city of Philadelphia in was 28, His coffin was carried by the most powerful men in the state of Pennsylvania and escorted to Christ Church by a crowd of citizens that included a contingent of printers and members of the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin founded.
Thomas Jefferson had returned from France in and visited with Franklin in Philadelphia about one month before his death. In his eulogy for Franklin, Jefferson told the story about his response to people in France who asked if he was really in that country to replace Franklin. He said that there was "more respect and veneration attached to the character of Doctor Franklin in France than to that of any other person in the same country.
I never passed half an hour in his company without hearing some observation or anecdote worth remembering. He joined the Freemasons in and was eventually elected grand master of the Masons of Pennsylvania. In the s, Franklin expanded into science and entrepreneurship. His pamphlet "A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge" underscored his interests and served as the founding document of the American Philosophical Society , the first scientific society in the colonies.
By , the year-old Franklin had become one of the richest men in Pennsylvania, and he became a soldier in the Pennsylvania militia. He turned his printing business over to a partner to give himself more time to conduct scientific experiments. He moved into a new house in Franklin also discovered the Gulf Stream after his return trip across the Atlantic Ocean from London in He began to speculate about why the westbound trip always took longer, and his measurements of ocean temperatures led to his discovery of the existence of the Gulf Stream.
This knowledge served to cut two weeks off the previous sailing time from Europe to North America. Andrews in Scotland.
In , Franklin wrote a pamphlet concerning the education of youth in Pennsylvania that resulted in the establishment of the Academy of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. In , Franklin conducted the famous kite-and-key experiment to demonstrate that lightning was electricity and soon after invented the lightning rod. He coined new electricity-related terms that are still part of the lexicon, such as battery, charge, conductor and electrify. In , Franklin acquired the first of several enslaved people to work in his new home and in the print shop.
Later in life, he became more vociferous in his opposition to slavery. Franklin served as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and wrote many tracts urging the abolition of slavery.
In he petitioned the U. Congress to end slavery and the trade. In , he was elected a Philadelphia alderman and a representative to the Pennsylvania Assembly, a position to which he was re-elected annually until Two years later, he accepted a royal appointment as deputy postmaster general of North America.
He represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress, which adopted his proposal to create a unified government for the 13 colonies. Franklin sailed to London to negotiate a long-standing dispute with the proprietors of the colony, the Penn family, taking William and his two enslaved people but leaving behind Deborah and Sarah.
He spent much of the next two decades in London, where he was drawn to the high society and intellectual salons of the cosmopolitan city. After Franklin returned to Philadelphia in , he toured the colonies to inspect its post offices.
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