Alright, so the other day I got curious about something kinda random. I was thinking about baseball history, you know, the legends. And Babe Ruth popped into my head. Big guy, big hitter, bigger legend. But then I realized, I didn’t actually know how his story ended. Like, what did Babe Ruth die of?
It just struck me as odd that I knew so much about his life on the field, but nothing about his passing. So, I decided to do a little digging. It wasn’t like some big research project, just me sitting down and trying to satisfy my own curiosity.
I went online, pretty standard stuff. Typed in a few variations like “Babe Ruth death cause” or “how did Babe Ruth die”. You know how it goes. Lots of pages popped up immediately.
Pretty quickly, I saw the same answer appearing across different sources. It wasn’t some mystery or anything dramatic like that, which I guess I might have half-expected for such a larger-than-life figure.
Finding the Answer
Turns out, the Sultan of Swat, the Great Bambino himself, died from cancer. Specifically, it was nasopharyngeal carcinoma. That’s a fancy way of saying throat cancer, basically cancer in the upper part of the throat, behind the nose. Back then, treatments weren’t what they are today, obviously.
I read that he started feeling unwell, hoarse voice, pain, difficulty swallowing – typical symptoms for that kind of thing. Here’s a quick rundown of what I gathered about his final couple of years:
- He started experiencing severe headaches and hoarseness around 1946.
- Doctors initially didn’t catch the severity, or maybe the exact type of cancer.
- He underwent treatments, including radiation and some early forms of chemotherapy, which were quite experimental back then.
- Despite the treatments, his health continued to decline.
- He passed away in August 1948. He wasn’t that old, only 53.
It’s kinda sad, really. You think of him as this invincible powerhouse, hitting home runs and living large. To find out he battled a tough illness like cancer, and it took him relatively young, puts a different perspective on things. It makes these historical figures feel a bit more human, you know? Just goes to show, life comes at everyone, no matter how famous you are.
So yeah, that was my little journey into finding out about Babe Ruth’s final chapter. Just a bit of curiosity leading down a path to learning something new about an icon. It wasn’t complicated, just a straightforward search, but it filled a gap in my knowledge I didn’t even realize was there.
