From a Washington Post piece by Sarah Kliff that charts the things that kill us now as opposed to 200 years ago, a passage about the 1812 New England Journal of Medicine worrying over death by cannonball and sponteous combustion:

“Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact — could shatter bones, blind people, or even kill them. Reports of spontaneous combustion, especially of ‘brandy-drinking men and women,’ received serious, if skeptical, consideration. And physicians were obsessed with fevers — puerperal, petechial, catarrhal, and even an outbreak of ‘spotted fever’ in which some patients were neither spotted nor febrile.”