The Beginning of the Ming Dynasty. During the final 40 years of the Yuan Dynasty era (1279â1368), there were famines, drought, flooding on the Yellow River, a bubonic plague pandemic, and other natural disasters.
Cause of Death The Stonewall Jackson Monument on the Manassas Battlefield. By Rob Shenk â CC BY-SA 2.0. Four days later he begins to complain of chest pains and difficulty breathing. His surgeon and doctor, Hunter Holmes McGuire, diagnoses pneumonia in the right lung. Pneumonia was one of the most common causes of death during the Civil War. Doctors of the time sometimes relied on methods that were fast going out of favor. Stonewall was given mercury for its strong laxative properties and to induce vomiting.
The Civil War was the deadliest war in American history. Altogether, over 600,000 died in the conflict, more than World War I and World War II combined. A soldier was 13 times more likely to die in the Civil War than in the Vietnam War. One reason why the Civil War was so lethal was the introduction of improved weaponry. Cone-shaped bullets replaced musket balls, and beginning in 1862, smooth-bore muskets were replaced with rifles with grooved barrels, which imparted spin on a bullet and allowed a soldier to hit a target a quarter of a mile away.