What are some diseases my character could die from in the 1950s?

Meningitis still kills.

Many of the same ones as today, including influenza, meningitis, measles. One very specific horror in the 1950s was polio.

caw

Measles. First vaccination for measles wasn't available in the US until 1963. The fatality rate was as high as 1 in a 1,000 before the vaccine was in use.

There were many more vaccine preventable diseases killing people then. Chicken pox infections in adults has a high fatality rate. Meningitis killed (still does) young adults. It's relatively rare but often fatal. Both meningococcal and pneumococcal organisms can cause it. Influenza kills then and now.

What they said. Basically all the stuff they now have vaccines for.

To help narrow down candidates:

How do you need him to die, slow or fast? Any particular symptoms needed for story purposes (say, a delirium-inducing fever, causing him to blurt out something he shouldn't, for the MC to overhear)? How old is he, and where/how does he live? (Poor access to health care makes for a wider range of potential killers.) Do you want/need this disease to be infectious or contagious - i.e., possibly pose a risk to those exposed to him, or be part of a local epidemic - or is it a fairly isolated case? Must it be a disease, or could it be complications from an injury (say, an infection or blood clot issue)?

Think of the purpose this illness and death must serve in your plot, and try working backwards from there.

Anyone who's had a serious case of pneumonia will respect what a serious thing it is. A nice generic "heart disease". Tuberculosis still conjures up unpleasant pictures. Parkinson's was called "Paralysis agitans" back in the 50's.

Does he need to die of an illness? Because there's always a car accident (no safety glass and maybe even no seat belts!), drowning, food poisoning, or a fall.

You might try a database like the Missouri Death Certificates website. Look at the pre-1910 deaths if you want your information neatly typed up, but you need to plug in a county and a search term (ie, "Smith" or "William"). You can look at 1910-1965 to look at all the deaths in a particular date range, but you also need to be good at reading handwriting.

Tetanus? Rabies? Depends on what you want the result to be, or what you want to say about the character.

Cancer was particularly nasty in the fifties I gather, there weren't a lot of treatments. Just painful death.

You could die in the fifties from pretty much anything you can die of today with the notable exception of AIDS which wasn't recognised until the eighties.

My grandfather died in the fifties through a chain of events which might not be relevant today; he and my grandmother went to Brazil (a big adventure for a fifties Brit) and, in the heat, poor circulation led to him getting gangrene in his legs which were subsequently amputated. The ensuing infection led to his permanent stay in a cemetry in Sao Paulo.

As @BrightDreamer says - more details required for realistic help with the killing of your character...

Red Peril?


Jokes.

I would have thought polio or TB.

Not TB. Streptomycin had been discovered, and all the world was content that did the trick. Phew!

No seat belts. Safety glass in US-built cars, but foreign imports might lack it. Unsafe cars, baby boomer teens driving for risky thrills, older drivers unsure how to navigate that new invention, the freeway.

Cancer for sure. Heart attack for sure.

But if you want sudden death, nothing beats an auto accident.

Not sure you would characterise the following as diseases, but stroke and cerebral haemorrhage would do the trick.

I always thought aortic dissection was a nasty way to go, too.

How old is he, exactly? Do you need him to die fairly quickly and unexpectedly, or would a more lingering illness be better for the plot. For the former, any of the infectious diseases mentioned up thread are pretty plausible.

If you want him to die more gradually, cancers that are most likely in kids, teens, and young adults include leukemia, Hodgkin's lymphoma, some brain cancers, and testicular cancer (unlike prostate cancer, it's a cancer that's most common in younger men). These all have a high success rate for treatment today, but in the 1950s, there were fewer chemotherapy agents available (the first started to be used in the 40s), and death rates from pediatric cancers were still pretty high, especially if they recurred later. But even today, kids and young adults still die of cancer.

People died (and sometimes still die) of asthma too. Sometimes young adults get into trouble with it, because attacks can become less frequent as they mature, so they think they've outgrown it.

These articles may be of interest.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220806/

http://www.cancerprogress.net/timeline/pediatric-cancer

If you want a death to be really unexpected or sudden, car accidents are always realistic. Cars were a lot less safe back then than they are now, since few (if any) had seatbelts, and airbags, safety glass, and crumple zones didn't exist.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4818a1.htm

Botulism - courtesy of the same bugs that give you botox. It's rare but potentially fatal.

Necrotising fasciitis - again rare, but even with modern medical facilities it has a high mortality rate, and the main treatment strategy of surgical removal of the infected tissue is pretty extreme.

I was going to say measles, but I see someone else already has. Surprisingly deadly for one of the "ordinary childhood" diseases everyone expected kids to get when I was little.

If the character does not have to die from a diease. The death could be unexpected, such as a car accident. This could add some amount of unexpectedness to the story, which can be good.
The charater could die of something not thought of as a diease such as overweight or drinking alcohol for many years.
Or having an unknown bad habit, which is realized after his death, which can also be good when added to the story.

Breaking out my vintage microbiology degree ... seriously, almost everything except AIDS, Zika, Ebola and SARS is possible, even bubonic plague if he's in the right place.

Give me the requirements and I will kill him as needed.

What does the plot need as the length of illness, amount of suffering, and danger of spreading it to others?

Do you want him quarantined or not?

Do you want it treatable or not?

Quickly diagnosed or mystery illness?

Exactly where in the USA and what season of the year?

Will he move around during his brief tragic existence (could catch it one place and go home and show symptoms).

Has he travelled abroad? If so he could have contracted small pox.

You say in the 1950's. Does this mean you want them to die from something that is now cured or at least treated? Also where do they live in the United States? Certain infectious diseases are more prevalent in different locations. Does the person spend most their time in an urban or rural area and have they travelled to a different location or someone from abroad encountered them? Also does the death need to be caused by something infectious or can it be non-communicable like a stroke or a type of cancer.

If it needs to be infectious the first thing that comes to mind is polio. It affects young children and young adults, killing or leaving the person paralyzed. The Salk polio vaccine was created in 1952, which may cause an issue for your story or be perfect timing to just miss being vaccinated. Another option is to decide on the signs and symptoms you want the character to have and then find the disease that fits.

As far as I know only Smallpox has been declared eradicated world wide. Polio and malaria are eradicated in places like Europe and North America. It seems that it takes a while to go from "very rare" to "gone": polio eradicated in Europe only 20 years ago (!)

If you're unlucky almost any trivial infection can develop into sepsis that even today can kill a previously healthy young person within hours/days. This is still a thing that happens today, and it was much more prevalent in the 50s when diagnosis & treatment/life support were less developed.

benbenberi said:

If you're unlucky almost any trivial infection can develop into sepsis that even today can kill a previously healthy young person within hours/days. This is still a thing that happens today, and it was much more prevalent in the 50s when diagnosis & treatment/life support were less developed.

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Yup. I had two high school acquaintances who died very suddenly from this exact reason. Both complained of feeling ill upon waking in the morning, and were dead by midnight the same day.

caw

benbenberi said:

If you're unlucky almost any trivial infection can develop into sepsis that even today can kill a previously healthy young person within hours/days. This is still a thing that happens today, and it was much more prevalent in the 50s when diagnosis & treatment/life support were less developed.

Click to expand...

This isn't quite right. Only bacterial infections can cause sepsis, and not all pathogenic bacteria can do it.

I must say that having a medical degree does make reading awfully painful when authors try to sprinkle erroneous medicine into their work.
For example, in Palmer's Seven Surrenders, one of the key plot twists came about because detectives used heart rates to track the identity of people. This felt contrived and illogical. Given the advanced scientific setting and purpose, relying on a physiological parameter that has the least specificity seemed silly.

All I am saying is that you should try and aim to be accurate with medical detail in order to maintain a consistent world (and to avoid a bunch of doctors hurting their eyes while face palming). Clearly, this is the aim of your thread. All the suggestions above are great but a lot depends on age and living location of the characters.

Edit: viral infections can give you organ failure leading to death. Nasty flu is well known to do this but it isn't sepsis.

Measles or mumps would have the benefit of tapping into present-day controversy. Rubella, too, but I understand rubella was rarely fatal in otherwise healthy people.